


leave it all behind and there is happiness

by octothorpetopus



Series: evermore [2]
Category: The West Wing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Divorce, Falling In Love, Flashbacks, Friends to Lovers, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Marriage, Overuse of Eye Imagery, Overuse of Space Imagery, POV Josh Lyman, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, actually angst doesn’t begin to cover it, also i cried 6 times while writing this, i cannot stress how insane i was when i wrote this, welcome to my 95 page google doc that i slammed out in 38 days, you know how it is with samjosh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:15:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 48,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29952585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/octothorpetopus/pseuds/octothorpetopus
Summary: This is the story of a marriage.It spans almost thirty years.It begins and ends with a wedding.The wedding is not theirs, but they are in attendance.Their wedding was years ago.This story begins at the end.
Relationships: Josh Lyman/Sam Seaborn
Series: evermore [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2126469
Comments: 7
Kudos: 16





	leave it all behind and there is happiness

**Author's Note:**

> tw for (in no particular order) smoking and mentions of guns, nazis, car crashes, cancer, and serious injury... basically, if it’s something upsetting referenced in the show, here’s your trigger warning
> 
> this is dedicated to izzy, sarah, iry, clara, wild thing, sophie, gael, meg, bailey, and beth, who all listened to me talk about this and answer the insane questions I had for the last 38 days. I love you guys <3
> 
> also! if you're the kind of person who likes to listen to music while you read, I put together a little 10-song playlist for you:
> 
> https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6lEnLwhSfQgvWEsBSeMQWU?si=YpxxJzY8R569yvAZhu-Ckw

A quiet June evening in New Hampshire. Josh Lyman looks up at the black sky and he sees stars. He rarely, if ever, sees the stars. Such is life lived from city to city, apartment to apartment. He always seems to come back here, to New Hampshire. There was a time when he thought he would never return, back when everything started to go wrong for him. And then an invitation and an RSVP card arrived in the mail: _You are invited to the wedding of Zoey Patricia Bartlet and Charles Benjamin Young on Saturday June 11 at 6 o’clock._ On the RSVP card, there was a space for the name of a plus-one, which he left blank. The invitation was addressed to Josh and Josh alone. 

He had considered not coming and considers it even now as he sits at an empty white-draped table, watching the band play. He could take off and be back in D.C. by morning if he drives all night. His slice of cake sits untouched next to a half-empty glass of white wine, which he never much cared for. He got in the habit of drinking white wine during The Good Times, but The Good Times have passed and he doesn’t know why he still drinks it.

He looks out at his friends, who are still his friends even if they have all grown apart, and cannot help but smile. Donna looks happier than she ever has in the arms of her latest girlfriend. C.J. and Toby, crazy kids that they are, seem to have finally gotten past lingering glances and play-flirting and are holding onto one another as though letting go means giving up. Josh knows all too well that that is exactly what letting go means. He cannot decide whether it makes him feel old or young to be unhappy. People spend their youth assuming happiness will come to them in old age, and then arrive at old age wishing for their youth to return. 

The stars are still bright. Too much smog in D.C., too much smog in New York, too much smog in Los Angeles, too much smog in Bridgeport. New Hampshire is the one place where the sky clears up and the stars shine through, but when Josh cannot see them, he does not miss them. The stars will always be inextricably linked to the man who loved them, and who loved Josh. That was a long time ago, when there were different constellations over their heads. 

The song changes, something louder and brighter with a trumpet line that makes Josh’s head hurt. He shakes himself from his own thoughts and gets up. At once, he can see Donna’s eyes light up. She waves a hand, beckoning him over, but Josh shakes his head. Still holding the half-empty wine glass, he walks away from the reception. There is a concrete path snaking through the country club at which the reception is being held, and although it is poorly lit, Josh follows it, content to waste time. In the near distance, like a beacon in the dark, there is a gazebo hung with a lantern or two. As Josh draws nearer, he can see that there is someone in it, but it doesn’t matter to him. A little small talk with a stranger never killed anyone. He would rather talk to a stranger right now than a friend. All of his friends were there for The Good Times and they have seen him fall away from the person he used to be, a divided Josh, one in the past and one in the now. Past-Josh would be trying to wrestle a mic away from the band right now so he could give a toast. Past-Josh would be dancing until his feet hurt, even though he can't dance and everyone tells him so. Past-Josh would be happy. Now-Josh is walking away from the party. Now-Josh wants to be alone, or at least not with his friends. Now-Josh knows he was happy once, but can’t quite remember what that feels like. 

The person in the gazebo is sitting and staring down into a beer. He’s wearing a tux, obviously another wedding guest, but his jacket is off and draped over the railing. As Josh gets closer, he can see more of the other guest.

 _Rimless glasses perched on the bridge of his nose_.

Closer now.

_A brass-topped cane propped against the railing._

The blur is fading away and Josh begins to see clearly.

_A cigarette dangling loosely between his fingers._

Only a few steps away.

_A carefully embroidered monogram on his shirt pocket._

Josh stops cold at the small patch of grass where the concrete path ends and the gazebo begins. It is too late, he cannot just turn and leave. He cannot do anything at all, in fact. He can’t seem to get his legs to move, or his arms, or even his lips. 

Sam tilts his head up to puff on his cigarette. His eyes don’t stop on Josh even for a moment, like Josh has been edited out of his surroundings. Then, with his eyes locked on the roof of the gazebo and smoke trailing from his lips, Sam freezes. For a moment, there is total stillness aside from the smoke floating up and away, back towards the stars.

“I can go,” he says without looking at Josh. That’s Sam, ever-flexible, ever-passive. 

“No.” Josh leans against one of the beams holding up the roof. “You were here first. I’ll find somewhere else.”

“Don’t. I don’t mind sharing. I just needed a little bit of quiet. The music was giving me a headache.”

“Yeah. Me too.” Josh sucks in a breath and steps into the gazebo. Sam finally looks at him, and his eyes widen, as if seeing him for the first time. “I thought you quit.”

“I did. Then I didn’t.”

“That shit’ll give you lung cancer.”

“You’ve been saying that since 1992,” Sam replies, but drops the cigarette in a shower of sparks and ashes and crushes it under his heel. 

“I don’t mind sharing. Not for a little while. Not if we just sit quietly.”

“We can do that.” Josh sits and stretches his legs out in front of him. Without the cigarette, Sam doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. He’s always been fidgety—overcaffeinated and anxious, really—but on such a still night, it presents itself more obviously. Sam stares up at the stars and Josh stares across the gazebo at him. Josh feels like he’s aged 100 years since the last time they saw each other. Sam hasn’t aged a day since then, and he’s hardly aged at all since the first time they met.

“Are you still in L.A.?” Josh asks, breaking the silence.

“What happened to sitting quietly?” Sam smiles, exhausted.

“Oh, come on, Sam. You’ve never been much good at sitting quietly.”

“No. I’m not.” Sam pauses. That was true once, perhaps before the early years of their marriage. Blue shadows and orange light cast a strange pop-art glow across his face. “And yes. I’m still in L.A.”

“Practicing?”

“Law? Yes.”

“Thinking about running for something?” Sam flinches and Josh feels gutted. Running is a touchy subject. He shouldn’t have brought it up, but he doesn’t know what else he can bring up. His inability to talk about anything other than elections is what got him here. In part, anyway. There are a lot of things that turned him into Now-Josh. But perhaps Sam is a new person too. Perhaps he, like Josh, is divided into Past-Sam and Now-Sam. Only Now-Sam carries the same cane as Past-Sam. He smokes the same brand of cigarettes, his shirts are monogrammed the same way, and his glasses rest in the same spot on the bridge of his nose.

“Maybe. There’s a city council election coming up next year. I was thinking about it.”

“Hm.” Josh falls quiet. This is hardly something he needs to comment on. Nothing in Sam’s life is anything that requires commentary from Josh. He gave up his right to commentary along with half of his income and the apartment in Arlington. 

“This is weird,” Sam says and fishes a new cigarette out of his jacket pocket. Against all odds, his honesty makes Josh snort, and he smiles puzzledly. Laughter is unexpected. Laughter is dangerous. Laughter is a nuclear weapon in the Stone Age. 

“Yeah. I’m having a drink and a smoke with my ex-husband at my former boss’s daughter’s wedding. Doesn’t get much weirder than this.”

“Maybe if a UFO landed in that flower bed over there.” In a few short quips, they could almost be their old selves, sitting in the Roosevelt Room or on Air Force One. They are not, however, in the Roosevelt Room or Air Force One. Josh is not his old self. He is an aging divorcee lacking the self control to pick himself up and go back to the party. He is Josh Lyman, and this is all his fault. 

A breeze ruffles Josh’s hair and he realizes all at once just how strange this is. It has been two years since he has seen Sam, and longer than that since they have sat comfortably together like this. There was a time before the hurt, a time Josh has done his best to ignore. If he ignores it, it simply ceases to exist, and if it ceases to exist, then the pain lessens. That’s the theory, anyway. Josh has yet to prove that it works. In the silence that falls again, silence that was so rare before, he looks up at the stars, drawing new constellations of his own design. The Lincoln Memorial. A Christmas tree. An engagement ring. A podium. A baby carriage. A motorcycle. He traces his life through the stars, watching it weave around the dark and crowded sky.

“I’m going to take a walk,” Sam announces, pulling Josh’s attention away from his artistic endeavors. He gets up slowly, like his muscles don’t quite work, leaning on his cane, although not as much as he used to. He has aged just as much as Josh has, however it seems. It is comforting to know that Josh is not alone in getting older. It is painful to realize that Sam’s life continues to progress with or without Josh. They have both left The Good Times. Josh pours the remaining white wine into the grass. Sam doesn’t stop until he’s several steps away from the gazebo and his face has fallen out of the light. “Walk with me.” There is so much talk about three little words. In Josh’s life, there have been many three-word sentences.

_“I’m Josh Lyman.”_

_“Let’s go out.”_

_“I love you.”_

_“Marry me, please.”_

_“Are we okay?”_

_“I’m done now.”_

_“I miss you.”_

Of all of the words in the English language, and all of the three-word sentences they can be arranged into, _“Walk with me”_ stands alone. Miles of their lives have been walked alongside one another, Josh taking long strides to keep up with Sam, who walks and talks and thinks a mile a minute. The path their steps together have worn through Josh’s head is so well-trodden it looks more like a ravine carved out by a flood, creating rockslides, destroying roads and tearing buildings in two. 

“Okay.” Josh leaves the empty glass behind and joins Sam just outside of light’s reach. The world is faded and dull in darkness, all except for one thing. Sam. His glasses catch the reflection of the stars, and Josh can see the world through him for just a moment. It’s brighter, whatever plane of reality Sam is on. Maybe he hasn’t made it all the way back to happiness, where their friends are dancing and drinking and retaining their youth, but he’s closer than Josh. He can see the stars. 

Stars and rain and Sam haunt his memory like ghosts of the not-quite-dead. Since moving to D.C., there is one night Josh can recall ever seeing the stars. It was the evening his father was diagnosed with cancer. It was more than that. All events are more than they seem. This event, this late-night walk where the only sounds are shoes scuffing on concrete and faint music and the gentle _clunk_ of Sam’s cane, is more than it seems. It is the first time they have seen each other in a long time. This is by far the closest they have been in a long time. If Josh takes one long step forward and a half a step to his left, he could slip his hand into Sam’s pocket, but he won’t. That’s the kind of thing kids do when they’re so in love that they feel they can never be close enough. A little distance is good. A little distance means the inevitable explosion won’t cause as much damage. 

Sam is walking like he has someplace to be. Even with the cane, he moves quickly. He’s always moving. That was what they always used to have in common, that neither of them ever liked to be still, even for a second. Josh walks fast to fill his time, to take up every second he is allowed on this earth. Sam thinks that he can outrun time. If he can stay ahead, if he just keeps up his energy and never falters, he will stay ahead of the world. To Josh, it has always seemed as though Sam believes that humans possess the capability for flight, and if he just runs fast enough, one day his feet will lift off the ground entirely. The music from over the hill fades away and they are left with only the sound of their steps. Their shoes remain firmly on the pavement. 

A gust of wind billows Josh’s coat out behind him. Sam stops cold, looking up at the sky, and Josh narrowly avoids crashing into him before he too comes to a stop. In the near distance, lightning strikes, and in the now dead-silence, Josh can hear the rain fall. He is about to say something, but notices Sam’s eyes still fixated on a point nearly straight up over his head and looks up. The wind is pushing a black curtain of storm clouds over the sky, blocking out the stars. Without their reflection on Sam’s glasses, Josh can finally see his eyes. To him, they have always been the blue of forget-me-nots and the last streaks of daylight in a sunset sky, youth and vitality and just a little bit of anger burning behind the irises. This is not the same Sam, however. This Sam’s eyes are the blue of gas fires and raging seas. There is less youth and more anger behind them. This Sam walks slower and talks less and is capable of standing still for more than seconds at a time and Josh can’t help but feel that this is the Sam he created, however inadvertently. 

“We ought to find a place to get out of the rain,” Sam says quietly. In tandem, he and Josh look up at the reception, where there is a plastic tent that the guests will gather under, close quarters for close friends; and then they look back at the gazebo, not too far off, still lit.

“Seems a waste to walk this far only to go right back to where we started.” Josh bites down on his tongue, hard. He is intent on proving he can follow Sam’s lead, even if he never has before. Sam nods and starts back towards the gazebo, picking up the pace until he is nearly jogging, hindered by the crutch that has carried him for 8 years. After a moment, Josh starts after him.

The rain catches up to them mere meters in front of refuge, and by the time Josh reaches dry land, his hair and jacket are already soaked through. There is something vaguely poetic about being so close to escaping the downpour and suffering the consequences anyway. 

“It’s really coming down,” he says, stating the obvious.

“I think we’re stuck,” Sam replies. Josh knows, somehow, that he is not referring to their location. They are standing at the edge of the gazebo. The tips of Josh’s shoes poke out into the air, and if he puts out his hand, the rain will splatter into his palm. He feels as though there is a fine layer of dust covering him, like an antique abandoned in someone’s attic, a relic that has become obsolete as times change and people grow and he remains stagnant. He still works, though. Of that he is sure. He could function again, perhaps just as well as he once did. He just needs something to clear away the dust. 

“Josh? What are you doing?” Josh opens his eyes and realizes that he has stepped out from under the safety and comfort of shelter. In seconds, the rain has soaked through his clothes, and though his vision is blurry, he can see Sam still standing in the gazebo, regarding him as though Josh has gone completely insane. It’s possible that he has, but it doesn’t feel like it. It’s been many years since Josh has felt at peace with himself. He feels it now, shivering slightly as freezing water seeps into his skin, chilling him down to his bones. Sam is still waiting for an answer, but Josh doesn’t have one. 

Lightning strikes. Thunder crashes. Josh slicks his wet hair out of his face. Sam stares at him with a furrowed brow and amused confusion.

Josh holds out his hand. An offer. An olive branch. A bridge across a great divide. 

Sam looks down at the hand that used to fit so comfortably in his pocket, and back up at Josh. 

The rain pours down out of a satin black sky.

—

February 14, 1992. Valentine’s Day. Josh didn’t have a date. 

His father had cancer. 

Josh didn’t have an umbrella.

His father still had cancer. 

The only umbrella in Josh’s possession was hanging on the coat rack in his apartment. One of the metal bits had snapped in half and he hadn’t gotten around to finding a new one. It wasn’t supposed to rain today, but Josh also wasn’t supposed to be walking around the National Mall at 9:30 at night. That was how things went, though, when God was a wrathful son-of-a-bitch. It rained just when you didn’t want it to. 

Josh’s father never called him at work, so that was the first clue that something was wrong. And then came the news, that he had gone to the doctor with a dull, aching pain in his hip, and the doctors had done some tests and then Josh had stopped listening until he heard the words ‘grade 3 osteosarcoma.’

Earl Brennan was a nice enough guy, and a decent boss, and all he had to see was the look on Josh’s face to tell him to take the rest of the night off. Josh wasn’t sure what he had looked like, exactly, when he walked into the congressman’s office, but he felt odd. Like his stomach had been removed and replaced with a large rock. There were rocks in the tips of his fingers and in the balls of his feet, too, and gravity was trying its damnedest to pull him down and keep him there. 

The rain had soaked through his clothes a while ago, and Josh wasn’t quite sure what he was doing now, wandering around the Reflecting Pool and waiting for something to happen. He could go home. He could have gone home a long time ago. So then, why not? Why stand here in the shadows of two great monuments and allow himself to be drenched by the rain?

Head down, he kept walking. _Walk, and you’re doing something,_ he reminded himself. _Walk, and you’re here for a reason. Walk, and you’re not here while your dad is dying in Connecticut for nothing. Walk, and this all matters. Walk, and-_

In his head, Josh was alone. In reality, that was not quite true, and he came to that conclusion when he collided with something big and solid and decidedly human. Josh went down hard on his ass, straight into a puddle, although the whole mall was practically a puddle. 

“Oh my god, are you okay?” Before he could even open his eyes, a strong pair of hands grabbed Josh’s arm and pulled him back to his feet.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m-” Josh wiped his face enough to see whoever it was who he had crashed into. “I’m fine.”

“You should probably look where you’re going.” It was just a jogger, a young guy with shaggy hair that was probably brown but looked black soaking wet. Josh couldn’t decide what was weirder about him—that he was jogging in the pouring rain or that he looked happy to be doing so. 

“Yeah. Sorry.” On an ordinary day, Josh probably wouldn’t have apologized for crashing into someone. On an ordinary day, he would’ve started a fight. On an ordinary day, he wouldn’t be one of the only two people on the National Mall. “I thought I was alone.”

“It really is empty out here, huh?” The jogger put his hands on his hips and smiled. “You doing okay, man? You look… I don’t know. Like you’re not really here.”

“I’m a little distracted.” Josh waved off the comment. He wasn’t really in the mood to explain himself, or to talk to anyone at all, but there was something holding him here, something stronger than gravity, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

“Do I know you?”

“Hm?”

“I don’t know. You just look familiar.”

“Oh, I don’t know-”

“You’re one of LeBrandt’s aides, right?” And just like that, Josh could see this same jogger in a suit and tie.

“Yeah.” The kid looked pleased to be recognized.

“You nearly knocked me over running to a floor session last week.” Why was this happening? Why was he making small talk with a kid he barely recognized when all he really wanted was to go home and sleep? Kindness did not come easy to Josh at any point in his life, and yet, right now, it felt like the only option. 

“Yeah. I did. Sorry.” The kid grimaced apologetically. “We can call this returning the favor, then.”

“Sure.” Josh found himself extending a hand. “I’m Josh Lyman. Congressman Brennan’s Chief of Staff.”

“Yeah. I know. I’m Sam Seaborn. Sorry, again.”

“Sam Seaborn. That sounds like a name from a Superman comic.”

“My parents liked the alliteration. My dad is Steve and my mom’s Susan so I guess they wanted to keep it going.”

“Huh. Cute.” At some point in the time they’d been talking, Josh had started walking, and Sam walked right alongside. Neither of them was particularly concerned about the rain. “What are you doing out here?” Josh asked, intent to talk about anything other than himself. “Is jogging in the rain some new thing?” Sam laughed, and the sound lifted above the splatter of rain on the sidewalk, echoing around the empty mall.

“Not at all. I’ve been working since seven. Left the office at nine. I’ll go to sleep in about…” Sam checked his watch. “Forty minutes. I get a half an hour after work, before I go to bed, and that’s the only time I get to myself that I don’t spend sleeping or eating.”

“So you jog? Why not watch TV at home, or go out with your friends?”

“Honestly? I don’t have that many friends here. Most of my friends are pretty much anywhere else.”

“Are you a student?”

“Graduated law school last spring. But besides. I like jogging. It lets me know that I’ve still got a little life left in me after Congress sucks the energy out of me.” Josh paused.

“You’ve been out here for a year and you still don’t have any friends?”

“I don’t have a lot of time to make friends.”

“Don’t you work with people?”

“Most of them are, like, old as hell. And the ones who aren’t are just as exhausted as I am.”

“And, what, running doesn’t make you more exhausted?”

“Of course it does. But it’s a different kind of exhaustion.” As they approached the Lincoln Memorial, the rain began to lighten up. “This work, it’s exhausting, but exhausting in the kind of way that you think you won’t ever see the end of it. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. It’s just long and difficult and painful. I love it, don’t get me wrong. It’s all worth it for the odd moment of feeling you’ve made someone’s life better. But there is no end to the work to be done, and only so much one person can do. Jogging is different. Jogging, you do it all by yourself, and you get to feel a little accomplished no matter how far you go. You can stop whenever you want and you don’t let anyone down. You don’t risk letting another group of people go unhelped because you got tired. You win or you lose, and you do it all on your own terms.”

“That’s… remarkably profound.” They were just nearing the base of the Memorial, and the rain let up. Sam chuckled and slicked his hair out of his face. 

“I try.” With a low grunt of effort, he lowered himself onto the steps and sat there with his legs stretched out in front of him. After a moment’s hesitation, Josh joined him. He wasn’t sure what exactly kept him here, with this unusually thoughtful law school grad whose long, tan legs overpowered Josh nearly as much as his philosophical mind. What was he doing here, flirting with an aide for a congressman he didn’t much like, when his father was dying in Connecticut? That was what he kept coming back to. His dad had cancer. Nothing else should have mattered to him, but his brain didn’t know that. It didn’t seem to understand that life shouldn’t go on as usual. 

“Look,” Sam said. If he noticed Josh was somewhere else, he didn’t let on. Josh followed his pointed finger to a small strip of stars, visible as a strong breeze began to push the clouds away. “Columba.”

“Huh?”

“That constellation. It’s Columba. The Dove.”

“You know that? Just off the top of your head?” Sam shrugged.

“I like stars. And I’ve got a mind for information.”

“Yeah? Hit me with something else.”

“Um… okay. Columba’s original name was Columba Noachi, which means ‘Noah’s Dove’.” Josh’s heart stopped in his chest and he let out a harsh breath, as if he had been punched in the chest. “Whoa. Are you okay?” A worried wrinkle formed between Sam’s eyebrows.

“Yeah, I’m just… my dad’s name is Noah.” On the near-empty National Mall, Josh had crashed into the only other person around. That person just happened to be someone he knew, and who had crashed into him only a week earlier. Now this. Tonight was a night for coincidences, or perhaps more than that. Josh didn’t believe in fate, much to the chagrin of his junior year philosophy professor, but he was raised to believe in miracles, and in such a bizarre confluence of events, it was difficult to believe that these might be anything other than a series of strange miracles. And if tonight was a night of miracles, perhaps the ever-callous, ever-guarded Josh Lyman could afford a risk. “My dad has cancer. I just found out today. Stage II osteosarcoma.” The wrinkle in Sam’s forehead deepened.

“I, um… I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. That’s a weird thing to drop on a person you don’t know all that well. It’s just been a weird night for me.”

“Can I say something weird?”

“If we can stop using the word ‘weird.’”

“Last week. The day I ran into you. I was planning on quitting. I decided I was fed up with not being able to see the light at the end and I just wanted to go home, two-thousand miles away, and find something else to do. Some other way to feel accomplished without worrying there would always be someone more to help and I’d be letting them down if I quit later.”

“What happened?”

“You did.” Sam said it so earnestly that even though Josh had no idea what he possibly could have done to change Sam’s mind, he believed him. “I was sprinting to a floor session and I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, and then I slammed into you. We didn’t even talk, but you picked up what must have been thirty or forty policy memos and just kept going. And it hit me. You’re like me, just one person trying to make a dent in a mountain of work, and even though you knew that those forty policy memos weren’t all going to make it into bills and the ones that did were likely not to pass, but you picked them up and kept going and didn’t waste time because the work matters. The effects… who knows what the effects are ever going to be, but the work matters.”

“Good to know I made someone else feel better about their life. God knows I can’t seem to do the same for myself.”

“I know we just met, but I’m sorry about your dad.”

“Thanks.” Sam wrapped his arms around his knees. Despite the fact that it was February and he wore only a soaked-through t-shirt and joggers, he didn’t seem to be shivering at all. “You run in the rain a lot?”

“Yeah, actually. At least, I did. I’m from California, and it doesn’t rain there a lot. Running in dry heat sucks, so I’d always wait until it started raining and cooled down a little. It reminds me of home.”

“Yeah? Then why’d you move three thousand miles away?”

“I hate my parents.” Josh laughed for a moment before he noticed Sam wasn’t laughing.

“Parents’ll fuck you up,” he said, and resisted the urge to squeeze Sam’s hand. Genuinely, Josh couldn’t tell what was wrong with himself today. It was like the phone call from his father had given him some kind of brain damage and changed his entire personality from the root. 

“No kidding. Sometimes, I think that I was switched at birth with their real kid, and that’s why nothing about me seems to be up-to-standard.”

“You’re a law school graduate and aide to one of the most highly-approved Democratic representatives in Congress. What more do they want, a Nobel Prize?”

“They want me to be an easy kid. I have spent my entire life trying to make myself easier for them, to be a net benefit in their lives, but it doesn’t ever seem to be enough. So when I graduated law school, I turned down a six-figure offer from a corporate firm twenty minutes from my house and I booked it out here. I figured if I couldn’t make them happy, I would make myself not their problem. Don’t know that it was the right choice, but I guess I never will.”

“Well, I know I’m a relative stranger, but I think this work suits you. I think you’re the right kind of person to be doing this job. I think you should keep doing it.”

“Thanks.” Josh pushed himself to his feet, wobbling slightly. He looked up at the massive marble Lincoln, and then over his head to the sky, scattered with stars like a black surface splattered with white paint. Like a mistake, but a beautiful one. 

“You’ve got one hell of a way with words, Sam. You ever thought about being a writer? I’m sure you could do some campaign speechwriting if that kind of thing interests you.”

“Yeah, I mean, it does. I don’t know the first thing about getting a job on a campaign.”

“Well… I do. Congressman Brennan’s running for reelection. If you want to come on and do some writing, or if you just need a friend who’s not old or too tired to hang-” Josh dug his wallet out of his pocket and pulled out a slightly damp business card. “-give me a call.” Sam took it, the tips of his fingers brushing Josh’s just barely. 

“You met me ten minutes ago and you’re already prepared to offer me a job?” Josh tipped back his head and grinned up at the nothingness over his head.

“I don’t really believe in anything. Not God, not heaven and hell, and certainly not miracles. But you… tonight… I think you’re the closest I’ve ever come to a real-life, bona-fide miracle. I don’t know why, but I don’t think this is the last time our paths are gonna cross, and I don’t know about you, but I could use a few more miracles in my life. Give me a call sometime. I’ll see you around.” Josh walked away, shaking the water from his hair like a wet dog. Meeting Sam tonight was strange for a lot of reasons. Sam was out running around in the rain because he didn’t want to be anywhere else, Josh was out in the rain because he didn’t know where else to be. Sam could hardly see a purpose in the never-ending work of bureaucracy, Josh couldn’t see a purpose in doing anything else. Sam couldn’t wait to get as far away from his parents as possible, and the only thing Josh wanted right now was to see his own. When he got home, he would call his dad, and he would try to rest. Then, tomorrow morning, he would get up, and he would go to work. If his father was dying, if that was the only outcome Josh could possibly resign himself to, then he would spend the rest of his father’s life doing what Sam thought he couldn’t do—he was going to make his dad happy. 

And then maybe Sam would call. Josh couldn’t recall the last time someone had given him credit for improving their life. Maybe he could make Sam happy too. Unrealistic, perhaps, but nice to think about.

—

December 21st, 1997. New York City. The first time Josh had been back since that rainy day in October when he had showed up at Sam’s office. It was different now, far less daunting (not that Josh ever would have admitted that New York terrified him). Maybe it was that he knew the streets better now. Or maybe it was just that he had Sam to navigate for him. In the six weeks or so they had been working together, the first time since very early on in their careers, Sam had become a sort of navigator for Josh in every form. His mind was a living encyclopedia of information, which Josh found useful, but he also seemed to have a solution to every moral dilemma that Governor Bartlet wrestled with, and Josh found quickly that Sam knew the emotions of the people around them far better than he knew his own. He was young, still, and volatile. It had been difficult to see when he was in a role he didn’t suit him, but speechwriting suited him just fine, and now Josh could see how unsteady he was. Sam was hungry and restless and eager to prove he could be more than he needed to be. He tried too often to go above and beyond the call of duty and he failed too often to meet the standards that he set for himself. When he did fail, he did not retreat, but doubled down, determined to do better the next time, and that meant that after only six weeks of campaigning, he was working himself to the bone. That was why Josh found him at 7:30 in the morning, three days before Christmas Eve, already at his desk and pounding away at his computer with the heavy-handedness that meant he was angry with himself.

“Did you sleep last night?” Josh asked. Sam jumped, blinking rapidly like he couldn’t quite grasp the image of Josh in front of him.

“Yes. Well, I closed my eyes.”

“You blinked?”

“I blinked.” Josh sat on the edge of the desk and slammed the laptop shut, narrowly avoiding crushing Sam’s fingers.

“Hey! I was working, and I didn’t save it or-”

“Sam. This is your sixth draft. The governor signed off on the third one, you don’t need to-”

“But the third one wasn’t as good-”

“Sam! Listen to me!” Sam fell quiet, pushing his glasses up into his dark hair. He looked so much like a kicked puppy Josh couldn’t help but feel bad for yelling. “You’re working too hard.”

“Says you.” Sam scoffed.

“Yeah, says me.” Josh squeezed Sam’s shoulder. Static electricity sparked between his hand and Sam’s sweater and made him shiver. “You need a break.”

“This is a presidential campaign, there are no breaks-”

“Yes, there are. Now, it’s almost Christmas. Let’s go out.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. It’s New York City at Christmas. Let’s just go wander around, ‘kay?”

“It’s _New York City at Christmas,_ Josh. All the locals have gone back home and all the tourists have come here to do touristy shit.”

“So let’s go where the tourists aren’t.”

“There is nowhere where the tourists aren’t, Josh. They’re like cockroaches.”

“Aren’t we tourists?”

“You are. I lived here.”

“Okay, well, then… I’ll be your cockroach. You can take me on a tour of New York.” Sam leaned back in his chair and sighed.

“You’re not leaving me alone until I say yes, are you?”

“Oh, absolutely not, no.” Stone-faced, Sam folded his arms and thought for a moment.

“Fine,” he said. “I’m going back to the hotel for a shower. Meet me in the lobby in ninety minutes, and dress warm.”

“Will do.” Josh watched Sam bundle up in his coat and scarf and disappear into the early morning bustle. For so much of his life, Josh had been careless with people’s feelings. It wasn’t a conscious choice, he didn’t try to be rude, but it was what came naturally. And then Sam appeared in his life, and Josh noticed that kindness became instinct, in the same way hostility had always been his knee-jerk reaction. He watched out for Sam in the unfamiliar political terrain of a national campaign, and Sam watched out for Josh in diplomatic interactions that required a light hand and a cautious eye. Their relationship fell somewhere between friendship and codependence, under some label that Josh didn’t quite know the name for. It was a level of reliance he had seldom experienced and never enjoyed, but there was something different about Sam. Something that made reliance easy. That was among the many things Josh didn’t understand about their relationship, but he was determined to find out. 

Sam was waiting for him in the lobby as promised, hair still wet from the shower. Josh had stopped at the Starbucks on the corner and Sam accepted the coffee he offered gratefully, obviously in a better mood.

“So, what were you thinking for our grand tour of New York?” Josh asked. They walked down the sidewalk shoulder-to-shoulder, meandering through the crowds of tourists headed towards the Rockefeller Center to see the tree.

“We’ll see the tree later,” Sam said, dragging Josh against the flow. “First, Central Park.”

“Isn’t Central Park full of tourists?”

“Josh, I told you. Everywhere is full of tourists. But you’re a tourist today, and so we’re going to do touristy things, and the first of those things is the Central Park Zoo.”

The park was, as Josh had suspected, absolutely packed, but Sam had a friend who worked at the zoo and they were in within minutes. 

“Come on. Let’s find the penguins.” Sam latched onto Josh’s sleeve and dragged him in the direction of the penguin exhibit.

“Do you like penguins?” He paused, red-faced. Josh couldn’t decide if it was from the cold or embarrassment.

“They’re my favorite animal,” Sam responded, and kept walking. They maneuvered their way through a crowd of Midwestern families and horrifically romantic couples until they arrived at the glass barrier dividing audiences from the birds. Sam leaned over to peer in at the penguins.

“You know what?” Josh asked.

“What?”

“That one, right there?” Josh pointed at a slim king penguin waddling around the rocks in front of them.

“Yeah?”

“That’s what you look like in a tux.” Sam stared at him for a moment, painfully deadpan. Then he began losing a battle within himself, a thin smile appeared, which swiftly turned into a wide, toothy grin. It was the first time Josh had seen him smile in a week, maybe more. He had called Josh after all, way back when, but never took any of the jobs he was offered, only wrote a few speeches here and there and then disappeared to take a job at the D-triple-C and before Josh knew it, Sam was out of the political game entirely. His grand return wound up being bigger than anything he’d ever done before, which wasn’t saying much, since it was also the first campaign that Sam had truly allowed to consume him. Josh was an old pro, he knew this feeling well and he allowed it to happen. This was a new feeling for Sam, and he didn’t seem to understand that there would be life after the campaign, win or lose. Josh liked—no, he _loved_ winning—but he also knew that whether it was Bartlet or Hoynes or Wiley, there would be another presidential election in four years, and a midterm two years before that. Careers in electioneering were cyclical and never-ending. If you lost one year, you found a new candidate and you tried again until you found the right guy. Sam didn’t understand that quite yet. He would. Josh would show him. 

“Come on.” Sam was tugging at Josh’s collar. “Let’s go see the big cats.”

“I love the big cats.”

“Yeah.” Sam shook his head. His wet hair had frozen during their walk and he combed through the frosty black jumble with his free hand. “I know.”

They left the zoo in the early afternoon, noses and cheeks pink from the cold. Sam paid for coffee at a cart and laughed when Josh pointed out the confused-looking ducks who had forgotten to go south for the winter.

“Come on.” Sam pulled his one bare hand out of his pocket and held it out to Josh, who took it, freezing skin against freezing skin. He led Josh through a short maze of paths and trails, walking about a long step forward and half a step to the left of Josh, never letting go of his hand. Josh lagged behind him, reveling in the warm sun that dappled Sam’s back with spots of brilliant light.

“Where are we even going?”

“Do you ask questions because you actually need the answers or because you like the sound of your own voice?”

“Both.”

“Keep walking.” 

Everywhere Josh looked, there seemed to be couples. Teenagers nervously holding hands and using hot chocolate to hide their flushed faces. Young parents sitting together, watching their kids run around in the snow. Elderly husbands and wives taking an afternoon stroll, still madly in love after years together. Josh’s last relationship had ended just over a year ago, and he found he didn’t miss being in love. Being in love was like friendship, but lacking all of the comfort. A lover was just a friend you had to expose every ugly inch of yourself to, and hope that you were enough to gain their approval. Even if you remained in their good graces, you never stopped fighting to stay there. Never mind the endless searching for a way to keep loving them. Love was funny and stupid like that. If a person loved you, trying to love them became an endless battle. If they didn’t love you, the battle became trying to stop loving them.

“Josh.” Sam grabbed Josh’s arm and yanked him to a stop. Josh looked down to see a short wall in front of him. If he had kept walking, he would have tripped over it and face-planted on the other side. The other side, which was… what, exactly? He turned his eyes up from the wall and saw ice, glinting in the sun and dotted with people gliding across it.

“Ice skating?” he asked, raising his eyebrows in the smile of a skeptic.

“The Rockefeller Center rink is too crowded,” Sam explained. He sounded more like himself than he had in months. He didn’t sound like Josh anymore. That was a notion both comforting and unnerving. “This is always where I liked to come to skate.”

“You’re from California, how do you even know how to skate?”

“When I was at Princeton, I dated a hockey player. Skating was kind of all we ever did, except…” Sam blushed and cleared his throat. 

“She sounds like fun,” Josh said, patting his friend on the back, which only made Sam blush deeper.

“ _He_ was.” Josh felt himself turn red. 

“Right. Well, it might surprise you to learn that I don’t know how to skate.”

“You’re from Connecticut.”

“And? I was not an athletic child.” Sam shook his head.

“It’s fine. I’ll teach you.”

“That sounds like a bad idea.”

“I’m a great teacher.”

“Oh, I believe you. Except that, you know, I don’t.” 

“Jackass.” Sam punched Josh’s shoulder with his mittened hand. “Come on. It’s just like walking, except you have knives on your feet, and it’s not like walking at all.”

“Yeah, this sounds like a great plan.”

“It’s not that hard.”

As a matter of fact, skating was, in fact, that hard. Josh crashed to his knees almost immediately, but Sam was there to pull him back to his feet.

“I don’t think I can do this.”

“You can. Hold onto me.” Josh clung to Sam’s arm and wobbled onto the ice.

“Hey, wait, I think I’m-!” His skates went out from under him and then his tailbone smashed onto the ice. Sam, against all odds, remained upright.

“Come on. You got this.” Josh stood and stayed standing this time. He balanced himself on Sam’s outstretched arms. “One step. One step towards me.” Josh took one tiny step and didn’t fall. 

“Fuckin’ A,” he muttered and took another tiny step. Sam slid backwards to allow him room, grinning broadly with his frozen hair dangling in his face.

“You got it.” They kept going, Sam inching backwards as Josh inched forwards, until Josh was actually skating.

“I’m doing it! Sam, look, holy shit, I’m doing it!” A laugh bubbled up in Josh’s throat at how much he sounded like a little kid. He felt like a little kid too. All he wanted was to impress his best friend, and so he had. Sam released his grip on Josh’s arms in order to applaud.

“Nice job! What do you say we go do some actual skating?” Josh nodded.

“Do you, um…” He felt stupid, suddenly. “My balance isn’t great, do you mind if I…?”

“You can hold onto me.” Sam offered out his arm and Josh took it, grateful to be spared the embarrassment of asking. They stuck to the edges, moving slowly. Josh’s hand stayed warm in the crook of Sam’s elbow, and it didn’t ever occur to either of them that here, among all of these couples, they might look like a couple themselves. That was a thought that would not occur to Josh for another several hours. 

Being Jewish, Josh didn’t pay a ton of attention to most Christmas trees he saw. He hadn’t thought much of it when Sam told him over dinner at a quiet diner on 8th Avenue that they were headed to the Rockefeller Center to see the tree. He went because Sam seemed excited. He stayed because it seemed to him now that magic might exist, and it all came forth from 45 Rockefeller Plaza.

“Holy shit,” he said, turning to Sam.

“Yeah.” Sam didn’t look at him. His eyes were fixed on the tree, a glowing monolith of red and gold and green. “‘Holy shit’ is right.”

“I can see why you love it here.”

“I do. I did, anyway.”

“Not anymore?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I figured I’d come back here if we lose, because this is where my life has been planted for half a decade, but the longer I stay away, the more I realize I don’t like the Sam who existed in New York. I don’t like the people I worked for, I don’t like my ex-fiancee who lives here, and I don’t like how unbelievably alone I felt the whole time that New York was a part of my life. I like the winter here. I like penguins and ice skating and huge Christmas trees. But I don’t think I really like New York very much.”

“So…” Josh let out a breath, watching it freeze and drift away. “Where will you go? If this all goes to shit?” Sam chuckled breathlessly. “What?”

“It’s going to sound insane.” He did that thing with his hands that meant he was nervous and trying very hard not to seem that way.

“Why? I’m just asking where you’re planning on calling home if not D.C.”

“Because there’s only one place I can ever call home, Josh.”

“And?”

“And it’s wherever you are.” Shock and awe and something unidentifiable flashed before Josh’s eyes in shades of gold. His hand, the one not covered by Sam’s mitten, wasn’t cold anymore. Sam turned away, smiling thinly. “I’ve been waiting six years to tell you that.” Josh found himself stammering, trying to come up with a response and then ditching it before the words could leave his mouth, entirely unsatisfied with his own mind. So his mindfulness deserted him, or perhaps _he_ deserted _it_ , and with reckless abandon, Josh found Sam’s lips with his own. Nearly immediately, Sam pulled away, allowing cool air where there had briefly been only skin on skin. 

“You’re-”

“Yeah.” Before Sam could say anything else, Josh kissed him again, and this time, Sam kissed him back. Sam’s rough, flat fingertips just barely brushed Josh’s jawline, setting his neurons on fire. He had a lot of calluses for someone whose idea of physical labor was carrying his suits back and forth from his office to the dry cleaners. Josh wanted to ask. He wouldn’t ask now. The questions he asked now, he asked without speaking. He pushed forward, closing the gap and shutting out the cold air between them until there was no more air, no more space, only fabric on fabric, and below that, skin, and below _that_ , beating hearts. Ignoring the twisting in his stomach, Josh let his tongue graze over Sam’s lips. Coffee and salt and vanilla chapstick. A unique blend of everything Sam was. He asked a thousand different questions in that single touch. Sam answered them all with something hummed from the back of his throat. 

There was magic in the air and electricity in Josh’s veins. Sam was strong and steady under his hands. Josh thought Sam might have shattered if he’d kissed him any earlier. Not anymore. The ice had sealed up the cracks that had formed under the pressure of the campaign. He was stable now, standing on his own two feet. He could hold himself up without Josh, and Josh could hold himself up without Sam. This credence was voluntary. It was the result of a bond that formed over the course of six years. Josh finally understood why he could never seem to label it as friendship or codependence or mere familiarity. It wasn’t any of those things. It may have been, once. Not anymore. All it took was the simple brush of Sam’s fingers over the pounding in Josh’s chest to know it was something else. It was love.

—

February 13th, 1998. Three days after the New Hampshire primary, which Jed Bartlet had won by the world’s narrowest margin, even though it was his home state. Not really, but it had been close. John Hoynes and his staff would be kicking themselves. Josh didn’t care so much. It wasn’t his job to care. It was his job to win and win he had and he had been riding this high for days. The energy in the office was higher than it had been in months. Josh and Sam had gone from holding hands under the table where no one could see to holding them out in the open air, and no one had said a word. It was a long time coming, and Josh knew that now. Life was good, maybe better than it had been for awhile. Josh learned on the phone that his dad was in remission. That was a high he could have stayed on forever. He told his parents they were polling better than ever. He told his parents something else, too.

“Sam?”

“Hmm?” They were in the war room now. It was early afternoon, and the sun turned Sam’s hair from near-black to scorched bronze. Everyone else was gone, it was Friday. 

“I’m going home tomorrow for the night. My dad’s in remission.” Sam’s eyebrows shot up.

“Really? That’s great, Josh. Have fun.”

“I will. Yeah. It’s just, um…”

“What?” He couldn’t be nervous. It was stupid to be nervous.

“Okay, so I was talking to my mom on the phone-” Josh sat down, unable to keep his leg from bouncing. “-and she was telling me about my aunt’s new boyfriend and I was so excited because we won, and my dad’s okay, and you and I are doing really well, so I told her that I have a boyfriend. I told her about you. I’m sorry, I should have talked to you first-”

“Josh. It’s fine.” Sam smiled easily and put his hand on Josh’s knee. “I don’t mind that you told your mom about us.”

“No, that’s not what I’m sorry about. I told her we’d been together since December, and she sort of mentioned that she wanted to meet you, and so I may have asked my mother if she would be okay with you coming to dinner tomorrow night. With me. As my boyfriend. To meet them.” Sam froze momentarily, blinking rapidly.

“You did _what?!”_ he shouted and smacked Josh over the head with the legal pad he had been scribbling on.

“I’m sorry, okay?”

“Josh. Did you, at any point, stop to consider that A: I might not be ready to meet your parents; or B: I am absolutely not ready to meet your parents?”

“Hey. Hey. It’s fine. You’ll be fine.”

“I will not! I’m not good with parents!” That was a puzzling development. In all the years they had spent together, Josh had imagined Sam was nothing short of wonderful with every new person he met. He was a diplomat first, and it was equally charming and infuriating.

“I find that incredibly hard to believe.”

“It’s not. Not really,” Sam said miserably. “I talk too much. If you think I talk too much now, with you, when I’m comfortable, it’s a thousand times worse when I’m anxious about something, and trust me, meeting your parents is anxiety-inducing. It’s like, the most-”

“Sam.” Josh caught him mid-spiral. “Okay, I know you well enough to know that telling you not to be nervous isn’t going to do anything-”

“Accurate.”

“-but I can tell you this. My parents won’t mind that you talk too much. I imagine they’ll be pretty excited to listen to someone other than me talk for awhile, actually. It’ll be fun, okay?”

“Do your parents have a guest room? I’m not sharing your childhood bedroom.”

“We’ll get a hotel.” Sam nodded like he was trying to convince himself.

“Okay. Yeah. I’ll go.”

“Yeah? Good.” After a moment’s hesitation, Josh kissed Sam’s forehead and left. 

It had been 3 years since Josh had introduced a significant other to his parents. 6 weeks since he had been home at all. The last time he had gone home, it was Christmas. The last time he had gone home, it had been 16 hours after he kissed Sam at the Rockefeller Center. Time was a circle like that. Sam and his family and his life were all inextricably intertwined, and the second Sam met his parents, that tangled loop would cement. Sam would forever be a permanent fixture in Josh’s life. His family would always remember Sam as someone Josh had loved. The only thing that made that thought not terrifying was that Josh couldn’t imagine ever not loving Sam like he did right now. If his family was going to remember Sam as one of Josh’s great loves, that was just fine, so long as they remembered him as the last great love Josh would ever have.

Their flight was delayed, but they arrived in Hartford before dinner was supposed to start. 20 minutes before, but nevertheless, Josh kept reminding Sam, who was practically hyperventilating, they weren’t late. Sam carried their bags over his shoulders while Josh scanned the terminal for a familiar face. There was someone standing by the door holding a sign that he couldn’t quite make out. As he approached, Sam trailing behind, the lettering became clear: _JOSH & SAM. _He wanted to cry. His father hadn’t even met Sam yet, but there he was on the sign, like he’d been in their lives forever. 

And behind the sign, there he was. Josh resisted the urge to drop his backpack and run into his dad’s arms like a little kid. Instead, he just smiled and waved.

“Dad!” He called. Noah Lyman’s head popped up and he grinned. Josh had never realized how alike they looked. “Hey!”

“Hey, kid. How are you?” His father asked and reeled in his only son for a hug. 

“I’m good. Or, you know, I will be, assuming you don’t break one of my ribs.”

“Sorry.” Josh stepped back, still smiling. 

“You look good,” he said. His father rubbed his bald head with one hand and shook his head.

“Liar. You were always such an awful liar.”

“That’s what I keep telling him.” For just a second, Josh had forgotten about Sam, standing right behind him. His dad, too, seemed to notice Sam for the first time. Sam looked nervous. He looked like he was going to puke, or possibly pass out. Josh hoped his dad would go easy. He sometimes didn’t, with people he thought weren’t good enough for his son. 

“Sam, this is my dad, Noah Lyman. Dad, this is Sam Seaborn. My boyfriend.” Sam stuck out a trembling hand and forced a smile that looked more like a grimace. Noah looked down at the hand, then up at Sam’s nauseated expression, and then at Josh, who probably looked as terrified as he felt. Not that he’d ever have said it, but his father’s approval meant everything to him. His father’s approval was the reason he’d gone to Harvard and Yale. His father’s approval was why he worked in politics at all. His father’s approval was the key to feeling like he wasn’t wasting his life chasing rainbows. Maybe Sam was just his latest pipe dream. That’s not what it felt like. It was too real to be a dream, loving Sam. Still, he couldn’t know.

“Put that away,” Noah said. He knocked Sam’s hand aside and pulled him in for a hug, equally as tight and adoring as the one he had given Josh. Sam didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. His eyes remained wide, and his hands flailed for something to do. Josh was struck with the sad sense that this was the first time Sam had been hugged in a long time by anyone other than Josh. In Josh’s father’s arms, he suddenly looked very small. “I’m in remission, and my son’s home again,” Noah explained, and released Sam. “So forgive me if I’m rather excitable.”

“That’s just fine, sir, I don’t mind at all,” Sam replied, and now he was the one who didn’t seem to be able to stop smiling.

“God, don’t call me ‘sir.’ You can call me Noah.”

“I… okay.”

“Can I help you guys with your bags?”

“Dad, come on.” Josh stepped between his dad and their luggage. “You may be in remission, but we’re young and tough.” Sam flexed jokingly as if to prove his point. “You just tell me what you and mom have been up to and I’ll get the bags.” He slipped off his backpack and tossed it to Sam, who caught it with the gracious ease of someone who had seen it coming. Josh had never been predictable before, and he had never cared to be, but there was some kind of tenderness to having someone know his next move just as he made it. They were a coordinated effort, and when Josh met his father’s eyes, the same brown eyes that settled low under his own unruly eyebrows, he understood why his father had immediately taken to Sam. He was only ever going to love someone who was equally as devoted to his son as he was. None of Josh’s previous boyfriends or girlfriends had ever met that standard. Sam did. Sam had exceeded it. When they got into the backseat of Josh’s father’s SUV, it was as though Sam had been sitting in that backseat all his life. He made easy conversation, and he didn’t talk too much. Not that he ever could. Josh could have listened to Sam talk for hours. Instead, he sat behind his father in the driver's seat and listened to Sam and Noah discuss politics and the weather and baseball statistics, not really listening to any of it. He was finally beginning to see a pattern form in the chaos of his life. He couldn’t decide what the pattern was, it was much too big and much too complicated to understand more than in bits and pieces. But it was there, of that Josh was sure, and one day, he would learn to see the whole thing.

—

May 1998. Austin, Texas. The date didn’t matter. It was just another day on the campaign trail. They were doing the unbelievable. They were winning. As nice as the unbelievable felt during the day, it was nighttime when the exhaustion hit Josh. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d showered or had a glass of water, and he was surprised to find stubble when he touched his chin. At one in the morning, he fell into bed, the same uncomfortable, scratchy bed that he had slept in in a thousand hotels across the country. He didn’t even take off his shoes, because he wasn’t going to sleep. He was wired, unable to stop thinking about the whats and wheres and whys. He was sleeping okay, as much as he could, but there was a strategy out there in the universe somewhere that he hadn’t quite reached. Maybe if he stared up at the white spackle ceiling for long enough, it would come to him. His stomach grumbled. When was the last time he ate? Breakfast? He could vaguely remember being nauseated by the smell of hotel buffet waffles. Except this hotel didn’t have a continental breakfast. Was that yesterday’s hotel, the one in Baton Rouge? The days all ran together like sidewalk chalk in the rain. He switched on the TV. The voice of some Texas newscaster faded into white noise. Someone knocked on the door.

“Josh?” It was Sam, his voice low and congested with exhaustion. 

“Sam? Go to bed,” Josh called without moving. He couldn’t seem to drag himself out of bed. His limbs lay heavy around him. 

“Let me in.”

“I can’t get up, Sam.”

“Yes, you can, darling. I believe in you.” He was kidding, but he also wasn’t. He didn’t want to be alone, and Josh couldn’t blame him. Love made loneliness seem worse, somehow. Josh hauled himself to his feet and opened the door without bothering to look through the peephole. Sam looked older than 29, but when he smiled, it was still the smile of a teenager, tired and full of promise. He kissed Josh in place of a greeting, leaning into him so that Josh was holding him up.

“You should be in bed right now,” Josh murmured into Sam’s lips. “It’s late and you haven’t slept. You need to sleep.”

“How would you know that?”

“Your room in Louisiana was right over mine. I could hear you pacing.” Sam shook his head.

“I just needed to think.”

“Yeah, seems like that’s going around.” Josh stepped aside to allow Sam in. “What do you have?” he asked, gesturing to the plastic bag Sam was carrying.

“Takeout. I couldn’t remember if you like Chinese or Italian better, so I got both.” Josh took the bag and opened it.

“You… got this for me?”

“You need to eat.”

“How would you know that?”

“I pay attention.” Josh held out a box of fried rice and a pair of chopsticks. 

“Here.” Sam shook his head.

“I ate with everyone else. We ordered pizza, but you were working and Leo told us not to bug you.”

“You really got all of this—two kinds of takeout, a whole bag’s worth—just for me?” Sam smiled like it was obvious. 

“Yes.”

“God, I love you.” It would take Josh another several hours to realize that that was the first time he had said ‘I love you’ to Sam. He did not register it now, and neither did Sam, at least not visibly. 

“Eat,” Sam said, and flopped onto the bed, just where Josh had been lying minutes earlier. Josh kicked off his shoes and sat up next to him. “What are you watching?”

“Eh. Just the news. I can switch it over, if you want-” Sam waved his hand nonchalantly and Josh shoved a piece of orange chicken into his mouth. 

“I don’t care.” He inched over so that his head rested in Josh’s lap. “The news is fine with me.” Josh had two realizations as he absentmindedly stroked Sam’s hair. The first was that it had been at least 6o hours since he had eaten anything substantial. The second was that Sam had noticed before he had and taken it upon himself to bring Josh dinner. 

Low snoring shook Josh from his thoughts and he looked down. Sam’s breathing had grown slow and steady and his knees curled up towards his chest like a child. He was finally getting some sleep. He should have been asleep hours ago, but he refused to take care of himself until he took care of Josh and that was equally endearing and heartbreaking. Josh wouldn’t let that keep happening. He wouldn’t allow it. 

“Get some sleep, buddy,” he murmured and leaned back into the pillows. The news was a lot of nonsense, but in the atmosphere of a 1 a.m. dream-state, it faded into background noise. There was just Sam, asleep and snoring softly in Josh’s lap, and Josh, who was finally allowing himself to be known.

—

June 4th, 1998. Josh was sweating under the heavy black wool that covered his shoulders. It was too hot for a coat. He couldn’t seem to take it off. The monogram embroidered into the inner pocket—NL, Noah Lyman—was woven into his heartstrings. It was too hot. He couldn’t move. He just kept staring down at the pine casket, glinting in the sun.

“Josh?” The voice came from somewhere distant. “Josh?” This time, it came from right behind him.

“Hey,” he said to Sam, without turning to look at him.

“Hi.” Sam had walked Josh’s mom to the car after the service. Now he joined Josh by the casket. “Your mother’s asking after you. She’s wondering if you have to go back to New Hampshire right away.”

“Damn it. I need to call Leo.”

“I called him already. Told him you’ll be back in three days. I told him I’d be back then, too.”

“Sam, you can’t stay. Go meet everyone else in Arizona. I’ll be-”

“Fine? No. You won’t. Josh, I know that all you want right now is to be alone. I know that. I was the same way when my grandpa died. I didn’t have anyone there who was willing to just wait and be there until I was willing to talk. I’m going to be that person for you, even if all I’m doing is sitting in my hotel room until you’re ready to go home.”

“Go to Arizona,” Josh repeated. “I’m not interrupting your life just because mine has to be put on pause for a few days.”

“That’s what you don’t understand,” Sam said, and slipped his hand into Josh’s. Sam’s hands were perpetually cold. “I’m not putting my life on pause for you. Our lives overlap a little bit, more and more for each week I love you. I’m putting my life on pause because you need someone to be there for you. I’m putting my life on pause to make sure you and your mom are okay. I’m putting my life on pause because I liked your dad and I want a few months to mourn the father of the man I love.” Sam squeezed Josh’s hand, which stayed loose and lifeless at his side. “Would you like me to drive you to your mom’s?” Josh shook his head.

“No. I’ll get a ride. You go on ahead, go back to the hotel.”

“Call me, okay? When you want me to come over?” Josh nodded. Sam turned to leave.

“He loved you, you know?”

“What?”

“In the five months he knew you, I think my dad loved you.” Sam paused, seemingly at a loss for words. In an instant, Josh saw his eyes well up, and he turned away before Josh could see him cry.

“Call me.” His steps faded into the grass. 

Josh stayed for a moment, thinking about all of the things his father had seen. How he died with a finite number of memories that still vastly outnumbered Josh’s. How Josh would never again be able to seek his approval. He already had it for the things that mattered, though, didn’t he? The campaign. Bartlet. Sam. There were remnants of Noah Lyman in every decision he had helped Josh make. 

Josh looked up at the sun, squinting. It was still too bright, but there were clouds far off in the distance. Dark clouds. Storm clouds.

—

November 24th, 1999. 1 year and 3 weeks after election day. It still didn’t seem real to Josh, but he had watched the numbers come in along with everyone else on the TV, clenching his red and blue dry-erase markers in white-knuckled fists. It only took 16 hours to determine whether two years’ worth of hard work had paid off, and then it had, and here he was. Another year older. Still tired and still working too hard, but at least he was doing the work he always intended to do. Time ticked past and he and all his friends got older, but getting older seemed a lot easier now that he wasn’t getting older alone. C.J. had turned 38 exactly 6 months ago, and she said it wasn’t all that bad. Josh woke up on the morning of his own 38th birthday and it was just another day. Too cold and too windy and too busy. 

“You want to do something tonight?” Sam asked, his fingers deftly looping Josh’s tie around his neck in an act of simple domesticity that had become so commonplace since their lives officially settled in D.C.

“I don’t know.” Josh refused to make plans for tonight, which he knew infuriated Sam, but the truth was that it was quite likely he would end up working late night like he did every night, and since any fancy dinner or party would be more for Sam’s benefit than his own, Josh didn’t want to risk the disappointment. 

“I wish you would-”

“I know,” Josh sighed and kissed Sam’s forehead. “But we’re splitting town next weekend, so we can do whatever celebration stuff you want to do then.”

“It won’t be your birthday, though.”

“Sam. I don’t really care about my birthday.”

“Well, I do.”

“And I love you for that, but we need to get to work.” Josh handed Sam his suit coat from where it hung in the closet. “I’ll still be 38 in a week. Actually, I’ll be 38 for 364 more days.”

“Yeah, yeah. You're hysterical. Come on, Adam Sandler, let’s get going.”

The president wished Josh a happy birthday during the senior staff meeting. Josh’s mother called on his lunch break. Donna gave him a new tie that was much too flashy for his taste and Toby gave him a framed newspaper from election day. 

It wasn’t that Josh didn’t like his birthday. He had nothing against it, and nothing but fond memories of birthdays growing up. (Except for the one following Joanie’s death.) He just didn’t see a point. (The house looked back to normal, but the kitchen still smelled like smoke and ghosts.) Birthdays were days to celebrate nothing in particular except that two people had gotten it in their heads that it was a moral thing to do, to bring children into the world. (Christmas that year was a quiet event with few decorations and lights and presents.)

Sam brought him a cupcake around six and lit a candle even though it was a fire hazard. He told Josh to make a wish and so he did. He wished for spring to come early. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Josh wasn’t sure when he fell asleep. Sometime after he got back from a meeting at OEOB, his head had fallen on top of his arms and he fell asleep at his desk. His dreams were strange. All he could recall after waking was the flicker of a lantern on a rainy concrete walkway and the faint sound of trumpets that faded with someone shaking his shoulder.

“Josh.” Someone’s voice. His father’s? No. Leo. Josh yawned and picked his head up.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Leo, I-”

“Don’t worry about it. Come with me.” He was speaking in hushed tones Josh associated only with disaster. His lungs seemed to deflate and the air dropped twenty degrees. Was it the president? It couldn’t be. If something had happened to the president, there would be chaos. So then what? Sam? Had something happened to Sam? Leo walked too slowly for Josh and it made his head feel like it had been stuffed with cotton. His senses were dull except for something sharp sitting in the back of his throat. 

“What is hap-” Leo opened the door to the Roosevelt Room and pushed Josh inside.

 _“SURPRISE!”_ The sound hit Josh like a truck, blowing the cobwebs from his eyes and ears. There must have been a dozen people waiting for him, and at the front of the crowd, Sam and C.J. and Toby and Donna, all four with their arms around one another.

“Happy birthday!” Donna said with a giggle, and laughed even louder when Toby blew hard into a noisemaker.

“You guys threw me a surprise party?” Josh turned his gaze now to Sam, whose face had fallen. So it was Sam’s doing, then, more than anyone else. Josh wondered if this party had been thrown together when he said no to dinner tonight. But Sam knew Josh too well for that. He knew Josh well enough to know that he wouldn’t want to go to dinner, and so of course he would plan a surprise party at work. “You really managed to keep this a secret?” Sam allowed himself to beam for a moment before forcing a frown.

“I can keep a secret.”

“Okay.”

“I can!”

“I said okay.” Josh pulled Sam in for a hug and kissed the top of his head. “Thank you. Really.”

“I couldn’t just not do something for your birthday.”

“Yeah.” Josh felt himself begin to smile. “I should have known.” He allowed Sam and Donna to steer him around to the head of the table, where there was a cake. It was haphazardly assembled, not quite level and unevenly iced, but clearly the product of an afternoon hard at work. C.J. flushed a deep red when Josh glanced over at her.

“I tried.”

“It looks great.” 

_HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOSH_ was spelled out in bright blue frosting across the top. As the words veered towards the edge of the cake, the letters grew closer and closer together. Still, despite all its flaws, it was made with love, and so Josh could find no fault in it.

“Thank you,” he said, and wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

“It’s nothing. Blow out the candles.” Sam pulled his lighter out of his pocket. Josh rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything. Sam thought Josh didn’t notice when he crawled out of bed after sex or when he couldn't sleep and went out onto the fire escape to smoke, whether it was seventy degrees or twelve. Josh slept too lightly not to notice, but he never said anything. Sam held himself to too high of a standard most of the time. He needed something low and dirty and toxic to help him pretend he wasn’t. It could have been worse than smoking. That’s what Josh reminded himself.

“Make a wish,” Sam whispered, only an inch or two from Josh’s ear. A shiver ran down Josh’s spine. 

“I already made a wish today.” Josh slipped his hand into Sam’s. “I don’t think you’re allowed to do it twice.”

“What, because there are rules regarding birthday candle wish etiquette?”

“Fair point.” Josh bit his lip and stared down at the flickering lights. 38 of them, one for every year he had been alive on this floating rock. _Make a wish._ Wish for what? A new car? Those last eleven votes he needed in the senate? Hope? Love? Purpose? He hadn’t needed to wish for Sam to fall in love with him. He hadn’t needed to wish for this job. He hadn’t needed to wish for the things he had and the things he had were the things he needed. 

Josh blinked. 38 spots of light flashed behind his eyelids, burned into his vision. 38 years of want, 38 years of ambition, and he couldn’t think of a single thing to wish for. He could wish for his dad, but why waste wishes on something that can’t happen? He could wish for memory. In the years Josh spent with his father, he could only remember bits and pieces. That was true of his entire life. So much of it was lost in the gray space behind his eyes where his mind couldn’t reach.

And then it came to him, his one wish. Going back wouldn’t help him, remembering wouldn’t help him. He remembered the important things that have happened and he didn’t need the rest. What he needed was the future. To build more memories, many of which he would lose along with the rest, but he would retain the important ones. Josh closed his eyes, blew out the candles, and made a wish. He wished for time.

—

Sometime in October, the year 2000. Josh came to with a raging storm inside his head. Was he dead? He looked up and saw pure white. It sure seemed like he was dead. But if he was dead, why were his hands cold? Why was there a scratchy cotton blanket draped over his legs? Why was there a dull pounding in his head? So he wasn’t dead, then. 

He could vaguely recall his life Before. Before what, he couldn’t remember, but he was certain that there was a Before and now here he was in the After. 

In the Before, there was a man who was once a boy. He wanted to be something great and he worked hard to be great. He fell in love too many times and none of them lasted except for the last one, and when you really thought about it, the last one would be the only one who could ever last. So he fell in love and he tried to be great, and then the Before became the After. Somehow.

“Josh.” An angel stood in the doorway. Maybe Josh really was dead. The angel was familiar. He looked tired. He had no wings. “You’re awake.” A rainy evening on the National Mall and an afternoon spent ice skating and his father’s old SUV and hotel bedrooms. Not heaven, not hell, not purgatory, just life. So he wasn’t dead after all. 

“Sam.” Sam set aside the styrofoam coffee cup he was holding and nearly ran to Josh.

“You’re up.”

“Hi.”

“You’re up.”

“You said that.” The moment Sam’s fingertips touched his face, Josh felt like Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together and shocked to life. Not dead, definitely not dead. And Sam was his Dr. Frankenstein. He looked a little like a mad scientist, with his hair sticking up at odd angles and a slightly manic look in his eyes. “Hey, Doc.”

“What?” 

“Nothing.” Sam pressed his lips to Josh’s forehead. They were freezing, but maybe Josh was just burning up. “I missed you.” The little crease between Sam’s eyebrows formed. 

“Where did you go?” he asked, settling into a chair next to the bed. This was a hospital room, not heaven.

“I’m not sure. A lot of places. I saw you, but it was an old version of you.” Sam chuckled and shook his head. His hair fell into his face, but Josh saw him change for a moment. Quiet relief flickered to some kind of deep pain and back. 

“I’m the same me I’ve always been,” he said.

“No,” Josh replied. “You’re not.” Sam would chalk this all up to the ramblings of someone high on painkillers and five minutes out of a coma, but there was a hazy clarity in the divide between Before and After. Josh knew this was not the first Sam that he met on Valentine’s Day eight years ago, nor was it the Sam who taught him how to ice skate in Central Park. It took roughly nine years for a body to replace every cell with a new one, and just like that, Sam had rebuilt himself piece by piece every year that they had known each other until he was a new Sam. And in nine more years, that would happen again. It wasn’t just Sam, it was all of them. They were all slowly replacing themselves, bit by bit and inch by inch until there were a few more wrinkles around their eyes and a little more gray in their hair. Sam looked like he’d aged five years overnight. 

“How are you?” Josh asked, and reached out as best he could for Sam’s hand.

“How am I?” Sam scoffed and linked his hand loosely with Josh’s. “I’m just fine. How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay—okay-ish, anyway. I think they’re pumping me full of painkillers.”

“I have no doubt that they are.” Josh bit his lip.

“What happened?” he asked, and wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.

“You don’t remember?”

“Bits and pieces. I remember… the pilot. We recovered the pilot. There was the signal, the…” He weakly lifts his other arm and makes a motion like an airplane taking off. 

“Yes, yes, the-” Sam laughed and mimicked the same motion. He brushed a tear out of the corner of his eye and Josh pretended not to notice.

“We went outside. The president, he wanted to walk the rope line. And then… there were shots.” Sam nodded, solemn again. 

“Toby found you. C.J. and I, we were over by the car already, so Toby found you. You were in the back of the crowd, nowhere near Zoey or Charlie, but they must have not been aiming very carefully. “And you were-”

“I was hit.” Josh slid a hand to his stomach. Even through his hospital gown and the layers of bandages, he could feel stitches. “I remember.” Sam squeezed his hand tighter.

“I’m sorry. I should have been with you, but C.J. wanted to talk.”

“It’s not your fault.” Josh tried to smile, but his mouth was too dry, so he settled for a grimace. “You know what the funny thing is?”

“What?”

“I was trying to get to you. When I heard the first shot, I didn’t even think, I just ran. I tried to find you, but I ran into a gate. I just needed you to be okay. All I needed was to get to you, and now,” Josh tightened his grasp on Sam’s hand. “I got you.” Silently, Sam stammered for a moment. 

“You… oh.” Now, he couldn’t conceal his tears and he let them flow freely. Josh might have cried too, if he hadn’t been so dehydrated. Sam rested his forehead against their clasped fingers. Muffled sobs echoed around the dark room. Josh didn’t think he’d ever seen Sam cry before. It was heartbreaking.

“We’ll be alright.” He was reassuring Sam, sure, but himself too. The new Sam and the new Josh and the Before and After were all uncharted territories and this was one hell of an adjustment period. Josh ran his free hand through Sam’s hair. It was the same soft, dark hair he had been running his fingers through for years. Maybe they were still the same in some ways. Maybe the only changes were the ones that needed to change.

—

November 6th, 2002. He couldn’t be serious. He couldn’t be fucking serious, except that this was such an obviously Sam move that Josh didn’t know how he hadn’t seen it coming. Promising the widow of an Orange County Democrat and a maverick campaign manager that he would step in if they won because he thought there wasn’t a chance. It had Sam’s hopeless idealism written all over it. Sam Seaborn, patron saint of underdogs. It was so admirable that Josh couldn’t help but fall in love with him all over again, and so aggravating he wished he hadn’t given up on kickboxing after a week. If Sam had told him, it’s not like he would have been upset. Frankly, everything Amy had said back in C.J.’s office was accurate. They had a chance to do some real good in a district they hadn’t had a shot in since the Wilson administration. But if Sam had just _talked_ to him, they could have been prepared for this. They could have decided what to tell C.J. and Toby, together. He had no right to drop this on Josh right along with everyone else.

But nonetheless, Josh meant what he said. Sam would not look like a fool. He might look like a hopeless idealist, but he would not look foolish. If there was a Democrat who could win in CA-47, it was Sam.

He would think about it more tomorrow. For now, he was tired. He hadn’t seen his apartment in 21 hours. His hand shook as he slipped the key into the lock. Until he heard the faint sound of the shower running, Josh did not remember that this was not _his_ apartment. The pale 4 a.m. night cast ghostly shadows across the living room, and Josh, unable to walk another step, slumped into an armchair. 

“Josh.” Someone was shaking his shoulder. “Josh, honey, wake up.” Josh opened his eyes to the same darkness he must have fallen asleep in. Sam took him by the arm and helped him to his feet. “Come on, let’s get you to bed.” Josh allowed Sam to pull him into the bedroom, leaning on him all the while. Sam helped him wriggle out of his coat and Josh sat on the corner of the bed while Sam hung it up. 

“Why-” Sam was undoing Josh’s tie now. His face was mere inches from Josh’s, but he was intently focused on the tie and not Josh’s tired eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Sam didn’t answer. He took Josh’s tie and returned it to the rack hanging in the closet.

“I thought you’d think it was stupid,” he said at last. “I thought you’d think I was crazy to do it.” Josh just sat there, stunned by the revelation while Sam pulled back the covers and crawled into bed. 

“I’d never think you were crazy. Or stupid.” He pulled his shirt over his head and shook his head. “Not now, not ever, not for any reason.”

“Liar.”

“I’m not,” Josh replied, sliding in next to Sam, who had his back turned toward Josh, eyes facing the window, where narrow traces of sunrise were already beginning to form. “I’m not lying. I wish you’d talked to me. I could’ve been onboard. I am onboard. I just want us to be a team. That’s all.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. You’re right.” There was silence in the world for a moment, and then Sam rolled over so that he faced Josh. “Josh?” The sleep had disappeared from his voice.

“Hmm?”

“Marry me,” Sam said, and Josh tried to pull himself out of this dream. “Please.” It was not a dream. Josh’s eyes had fluttered closed the second his head hit the pillow but now they flew open. 

“Wh-” He looked over Sam’s shoulder at the clock on the nightstand. 4:26 a.m. Wednesday morning. “Are you serious?”

“Yes. Look.” Sam sat up and wrapped his arms around his knees. “Tomorrow, I fly to California. I don’t know what’s going to happen when I get there, except that I’m probably not going to win. You said you want us to be a team and you’re right, we should be. So when all this is over, however it ends, marry me.”

“I…” Josh realized suddenly that they had been together for 5 years. 5 years and marriage had only crossed his mind once, maybe twice. He realized that Sam had probably been thinking about marriage for a long time. He realized that after everything that had happened with Sam’s father, trusting Josh with marriage was a mountain he had waited to climb until now out of the fear that Josh would let him down like far too many people before. This was not spontaneous because nothing Sam did was spontaneous, not when you got right down into it. Giving Will Bailey and Mrs. Wilde his name was a calculated choice and so was this. These were decisions that came from the deep place in Sam’s mind, where he assembled the world like an enormous jigsaw puzzle that was his and his alone to solve. Every time he made a choice that might seem irrational to the outside world, Josh could hear the faint _click_ of a piece snapping into place. 

Taking Josh’s business card.

_Click._

Coming to New Hampshire.

_Click._

Giving Will Bailey his name.

_Click._

Asking Josh to marry him.

The piece was in Josh’s hand now. He could place it or discard it. This was his choice, but there was no choice. Five years of love, through life and death and everything between. 

“Yes.”

_Click._

Sam blinked as if shocked by the answer. His clear blue eyes, slightly illuminated by the digital clock, scanned Josh’s face. He raised his eyebrows, the corners of his lips turned up just so.

“Yeah?” Josh nodded and pulled Sam down for a kiss.

“Yes,” he repeated. “Yeah.” He was grinning now, laughing, almost. Sam’s hand was on his chest, tapping along with his heartbeat.

“We’re a team,” Sam murmured, and fell back on his pillow, grinning like a kid. 

“Always.” Josh tucked his head into the crook of Sam’s neck. He was asleep before the clock hit 4:30.

—

December, 2002. New Year’s Eve. 

“I don’t want to do this,” Sam groaned and tipped his head back so Josh could straighten his bow tie.

“We don’t _have_ to do this.” Josh chuckled. 

“No, no. If we’re going to get married, you have to meet my parents. They’re just so… ugh.”

“At the very least, we can use tonight to guilt them into paying for our wedding after ignoring you for your entire childhood.” Sam laughed, but it was more of a bitter bark. In truth, Josh was a little bit excited to meet Sam’s parents—more of a morbid curiosity, really. He knew remarkably little about them. All he had was what Sam had told him: that they were wealthy advertising moguls who hated each other and had left Sam to be raised by his grandfather and a series of nannies until he was 17 and ran off to Princeton. He hadn’t been home for any significant amount of time since and barely had contact with either of them until last year when Sam had gotten the news about the affair that his father had been having since he was five years old. At that time, despite Sam’s best efforts, his parents did not divorce. _They’re good Protestants_ , Sam relayed to Josh, scoffing all the while. _They’re not supposed to get a divorce. They’re not supposed to have affairs with women half their age starting when their only son is in kindergarten either, but I guess you’re allowed to pick and choose like that._ And that was roughly all Josh knew about Susan and Steve Seaborn. It seemed as though it had been Sam’s intention to keep Josh from meeting his parents until it was absolutely necessary, but Josh decided that their engagement did, in fact, make it necessary. He understood that his parents’ house was the last place Sam wanted to spend his New Year’s Eve, but they were in California. Josh was visiting for the weekend, and they had nowhere else to go. In a normal year, they would have gone to the Lincoln Memorial to watch the fireworks display, and they would have stood on the same step that they sat on when they first met. This, however, was far from a normal year, as Josh was reminded every time he looked down at the silver band on the fourth finger of his left hand and the _Seaborn for Congress_ button on the dresser.

“You’re right. You are. My father ruined his marriage, the very least he can do is pay for mine.”

“That’s the spirit.” Josh checked his watch. “We’re going to be late. It’s almost eleven.”

“Good.” Sam tugged at his cuffs. “That means I have time to tell you something I probably should have told you.”

“Dear god. What?”

“My parents have no idea you’re coming. They don’t know I’m engaged. They don’t even know I’m dating someone.”

“ _What?_ Do they even know you’re gay?” Sam nodded.

“Yes, they know I’m gay. You wouldn’t know it by the way they keep trying to set me up with their friends’ daughters, but they are aware I’m a homosexual. That being said, they invited me to this party completely out of the blue. Probably so they can try to hook me up with another WASPy centrist.”

“So I’m a party crasher?”

“Well, yes and no. No, they don’t know you’re coming, but you are marrying me, and therefore you’re part of the family. As horrible and fucked-up as that family may be.”

“You’re really selling this.”

“Remember the end goal.”

“Dad’s guilt money?”

“Dad’s guilt money.” Sam pulled on his coat and ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m ready.”

“Good.” Josh started towards the door.

“Wait! I forgot something.” Exasperated, he turned back.

“What?” Sam grabbed him by the shirt and kissed Josh once, so hard their teeth knocked together.

“That.” He grinned wickedly and took Josh’s hand. “Now I’m ready.”

Josh didn’t know what he was expecting Sam’s childhood home to look like. It certainly was not this enormous Mediterranean beachfront mansion that could fit his mom’s house in the garage.

“You lived here?” he asked, standing at the end of the driveway. Every window in the house was lit up and there was faint music and chatter wafting down towards them, and behind them, the ocean.

“Yep. The lovely Seaborn family home.”

“It’s huge.”

“It’s a gross waste of money and land is what it is. I didn’t spend a lot of time here, anyway. My parents loved to ship me up to my grandpa’s place in east L.A. as often as humanly possible. He’s the reason I am who I am, not them.” Sam pointed defiantly at the house before him. “And if he were still alive, he’d be the one I’d be introducing you to right now.” Josh slid his hand around Sam’s waist and slipped it into his pocket. 

“We only have to stay for an hour. And besides-” He grinned broadly, which made Sam smile just by itself. “-I’m looking forward to freaking out your parents and their friends.”

“That makes one of us.” Sam ducked his head, and with Josh’s hand still in his pocket, started up the driveway. As they approached, the music and chatter grew louder. Josh couldn’t reconcile the Sam he knew with this place. To him, Sam would always be the kid fresh out of law school who could barely afford the rent on his shitty Georgetown apartment and who ran in the rain because he worked so hard. He didn’t fit with the valet-parked BMWs and black-tie parties that he apparently came from. But as he rang the doorbell, straightening his spine and adopting a carefully neutral expression, Josh could see how Sam might have been… well, not-Sam. Then the door opened and the music reached a crescendo and they were standing in front of a woman with dark hair and an angular nose.

“Samuel!” She smiled so widely it couldn’t have been comfortable.

“Hello, mom.” There was a moment of awkward shuffling and Sam leaned down to kiss his mother’s cheek, pulling back as quickly as he could to the safe recess of Josh’s hand on his back.

“Steve!” Sam’s mother called back into the house. “Come see who it is!” She spoke like Sam hadn’t been invited. Like his appearance was unexpected. This was not the first invitation she and her husband had extended to Sam. This was, however, the first that Sam had accepted. After a moment of agonizing silence, a man appeared over her shoulder, and there was no mistaking him for Sam’s father. From his blue eyes to his sharp jaw to his stiff posture, he looked just like Sam in the first few years Josh had known him, still under the dark cloud of his parents’ influence.

“Sam.” Sam’s father managed a tight-lipped smile.

“Dad.” Sam did not smile. The three Seaborns stared at each other in some kind of silent conference. Then, all at once, they seemed to remember they were not alone. Sam cleared his throat and twitched his lip in what might have been either a grin or a grimace. “Josh, this is my mother and father, Susan and Steve Seaborn.” Josh shook both of their hands. He had a thousand questions. Namely, how had two people with sticks shoved this far up their asses managed to create Sam?

“It’s lovely to meet you,” he said, and prayed it looked like he was telling the truth.

“Mom, Dad…” Sam turned to Josh and suppressed a laugh. “This is Joshua Lyman. My fiance.” The glass in Susan Seaborn’s hand slipped from her grasp and it was a near-miraculous feat of instinct that Josh was able to catch it before it hit the ground.

“Uh, here.” He handed it back to her. Sam’s parents exchanged a long glance.

“Can we come in?” Sam asked. A small crowd was beginning to gather around the open door to see what was going on.

“I- well- fine.” Susan and Steve stepped aside to allow Sam in, and Josh followed suit. Eyes followed them from room to room to the kitchen, bustling with catering staff. Sam sat at the counter and Josh stood right behind him, painfully aware of the Seaborns’ watchful gaze. For a moment, the only sounds were normal kitchen noises, pots and pans clanging together over a low hum of chatter. 

“You’re _engaged?”_ Susan hissed.

“As of about two months ago.” Sam snagged a glass of champagne from a waiter. He was trying to keep his cool, and doing a good job of it.

“And you chose tonight, of all nights, to tell us? Christ, Sam, we didn’t even know you were seeing anyone. You couldn’t-” His mother sighed. Her shoulders sagged. “You couldn’t be bothered to pick up a phone and let us know?”

“What would you have said if I had called and told you, mom, hm? What would you have said if I had picked up the phone out of the blue and told you I’m getting married, and that it isn’t to one of the girls you picked out for me, it’s to a Jew from Connecticut with less than three-thousand dollars in his bank account who wouldn’t know a properly fitted suit if it walked up to him and introduced itself.”

“Hey!” 

“Sorry, honey, I’m exaggerating for dramatic effect. My point… my point is what would you have said?”

“Well…” Sam’s mother bit her lip, but his father looked less hesitant.

“We would have told you it’s a mistake, Samuel, just like we’re telling you now. No offense, Mr. Lyman, but Sam can and should do better than you. And Sam, I don’t understand why you think you can just drop this on us and we’ll be okay with it.”

“I don’t expect you to be okay with it. I mean, ideally, you should be, given that I’m your only son and this is who I love. But if you can’t manage that, then at the very least I need you to shut up and deal with it.”

“I am not going to ‘shut up and deal with it’, Sam. You’ve brought this stranger to our home, to our party that was supposed to be just family and friends-”

“Josh is my family!” Sam shouted and got to his feet. They had been arguing in hushed tones until now and Josh could feel every eye in the room turn towards them. “He is my friend and he is my family and that makes him your family too. I don’t understand-” He looked at Josh for a moment, and Josh saw his resolve weaken momentarily. Then the steel returned to his blue eyes and he let out a huff. “I don’t understand why you want me to be so much like you. Why you want me to marry one of _your_ people. The number of people here who are happy in their marriages, I can count them on one hand. I’m not going to end up like the two of you, hating the person I share a bed with and pretending that I don’t. I’m happy. Is that not enough?” Susan and Steve exchanged a glance. 

“I suppose there’s nothing we can do to change your mind?” Sam laughed sharply.

“No, dad. There isn’t.”

“Very well.” No one moved an inch.

“That’s it? ‘Very well?’ Your only son is getting married and that’s all you have to say?”

“No one would know you’re our son if you didn’t say it, Sam. You haven’t called in months.”

“And why do you think that is? When I tell you anything about my life, all you have to offer is criticism.” Sam gestured to Josh. “Exhibit A. I don’t tell you things because nothing I’ve ever done has been good enough for your stamp of approval, and I’m sick of hearing that over and over again. I would have been perfectly fine never telling you I’m getting married, but Josh insisted we come tonight. He wanted to meet you, despite all my reservations, and I can’t tell you enough that I will never be able to do better than Josh, because he is a good man. He has a good soul, and a great mind, and he is a better man than I am. So I’m going to marry him, and you can feel how you want about it, just don’t tell me unless you have something nice to say.” Josh marveled at how well Sam spoke through his rage. There was no cursing, no insults. He was so unlike Josh in that way.

“And you, Mr. Lyman?” Josh was shocked to hear his own name. He hadn’t said anything so far, mostly because it wasn’t his place. At its core, this argument between Sam and his parents had nothing to do with Josh, and it had begun long before Josh was ever in the picture. But Sam’s father watched him with hawklike eyes, waiting for a response.

“I…” His throat was extremely dry all of a sudden. “I love Sam, Mr. Seaborn. I love him with everything I have, although that isn’t much, and everything I am. I’m the one who wanted to come here tonight, because I didn’t think it was right for us to get married without knowing more about the people who raised him. I was hoping that you were not the same father as you were when Sam was a kid. I was hoping that learning your son is getting married would change something. I don’t think it has. I don’t want to be the force that divides you from your son, but to tell you the truth, I don’t think that’s what I am. Your problems as a family started a long time ago. I’m just here for Sam. Whatever he thinks, I’ll go along.” Sam squeezed Josh’s arm, smiling gratefully.

“We’re getting married,” Sam said. “That’s official, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do that will make me change my mind.” Steve opened his mouth to speak, but Sam waved a hand to cut him off. “And before you say a word about my inheritance, you’ve already paid for a good enough education that I made senior associate at two top New York law firms. I’ll get by without your money, if that’s what you’re about to threaten me with.”

“We’re not pulling your inheritance,” Susan said. She sounded tired. 

“Then that brings me to my point. You have one decision to make and one decision _only._ I am prepared to invite you to the wedding, under two conditions. One, you have to be civil. With each other, with me, with Josh, with Josh’s mother, with our friends. Essentially, don’t speak. Two, you have to pay for the wedding.” Steve spluttered.

“Excuse me? First, you come into my house and-”

“Remember, dad, it’s your decision whether you’d like to come or not. But you’ve been using your money to push me around since I was in kindergarten. It’s time you use it to do something I want, not just what you want for me. It’s tradition for the parents of the bride to pay for the wedding, but seeing as there is no bride at this wedding, and Josh only has his mother, I think you two can afford it. Those are my conditions. Take them or leave them.” Josh was unused to hearing ultimatums from Sam. Sam was a man of degrees, of incrementalism, of taking what he could get before asking for more. This was a situation in which he had nothing to lose, in which he could walk away empty-handed and not be disappointed.

The world seemed to be suspended in motion, like a yo-yo on a string. Sam, trying to quiet his anger. Susan, glancing between her husband and her son, clearly content with neither option. Steve, just as angry as Sam and much worse at hiding it. And Josh, the outsider, the interloper, the troublemaker. 

“Fine,” Steve said at long last, and set the yo-yo spinning again. “That’s… it’s fine.”

“Good,” Sam murmured, mostly to himself. “I’m glad.” And looking at his face, he genuinely was. “We’ll go, then, before we embarrass you any more in front of your friends.” Neither of his parents protested. Sam snagged a couple of beers from an ice bucket on the counter. He took Josh’s hand and led him out of the kitchen, back through the house, and out the front door without ever once looking back. 

Together, they walked down the driveway and across the street to where a small stretch of beach met the ocean, neither one saying a word. Sam stopped where pavement met sand to kick off his shoes and socks. Josh did the same and rolled his tuxedo pants up to mid-calf. The sand was cool under his feet, and a salty breeze ruffled his hair. For just a second, looking out at the moonlight sparkling across the waves, he couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever want to leave a place like this. Then Sam flopped into the sand beside him, like the life had been drained out of him, and Josh realized that all places are nicer when you’re not from there. He sat in the sand next to Sam and accepted the cold beer he was handed.

“Cheers,” he said, and knocked his bottle against Sam’s. They drank in silence, blocking out the noise still streaming from the house behind them. 

“I like it so much better in D.C.” Sam sounded like himself again, too exhausted to be angry. “If I win, I’m going to have to split my time between here and there and I just know I’ll wind up dreading my time here and spend every day waiting until I get to go back.”

“You’re really going to miss me that much?” Josh joked and nudged Sam with his shoulder.

“Yes,” Sam answered plainly. “I will.”

“You’re a marvel, you know that? An absolute marvel.”

“Thanks for coming tonight. Or, really, thanks for making me come tonight.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t really like my parents, and I don’t think they really like me. That’s a weird thing to know. Your parents are supposed to love you, they’re-” Sam’s voice cracked and he clenched his jaw. “They’re supposed to do anything for you. They’re supposed to love the people you love. They’re supposed to want your forgiveness when they fuck up and not need your praise when they’re doing what they’re supposed to do. They’re supposed to be your parents, for Christ’s sake.” Sam sniffled and wiped his eyes.

“I know. I know, baby.” Josh wrapped his arms around Sam and pulled him in as close as possible. “Parents’ll fuck you up.” He kissed the back of Sam’s head. “There is one upside, though.”

“What?” Sam’s voice was muffled through Josh’s shirt and his own tears.

“If we ever have kids, we’ll know exactly what not to do.” 

“Will we?” Sam turned his head up to look at Josh. “Have kids?”

“Do you want them?” He looked legitimately puzzled by the question.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I would be a good dad. It’s not like I had a great example.”

“You had your grandpa, didn’t you?” Sam let out a long exhale.

“That’s true. I did. I think… I think I would have kids, if you wanted to. Not right away, but somewhere down the line. What about you? Do you want kids?” Josh didn’t have to think to answer.

“Yeah. I do.” The funny thing was that he hadn’t wanted kids until his father died. He thought he’d be too much of a workaholic to be a good father. It wasn’t until he realized how much he was like his own father that he began to think maybe having kids wasn’t such a bad idea. Once Sam proposed, he started to think it was a downright good one. 

Sam tugged at his arm.

“What time is it?” Josh glanced down at his watch.

“Oh, shit.”

“What?”

“It’s almost midnight.” He held out the face of his silver Rolex so that Sam could see it too. 

“What do you think next year will be like?” Sam asked as they watched the seconds tick by. 

“I don’t know. But I do know that you’re on my team, whatever happens, and I’m on yours.”

“Always.”

“Forever.” 

From across the street, they could hear the partygoers counting down. _Ten… nine… eight… seven…_

“Six,” Sam whispered.

“Five.”

“Four.”

“Three.”

“Two.”

“One,” they said in unison. 

“Happy-” Josh leaned down and kissed Sam before he could finish. There were fireworks over the water and there were fireworks in Sam’s lips and the world exploded into color. Josh’s fingers tangled themselves in Sam’s hair. Sam’s arm snaked around Josh’s neck. They were a jumble of skin and fabric and flying sparks. Josh was an explorer. He was intent on finding the parts of Sam he had never seen. There was much to be explored, a new world in a galaxy light years away. Sam was too many things for one body. He was a son and a lover and a writer and a lawyer and a politician. He was more beyond that. The ring on Josh’s finger was the key to the unexplorable. By the time they were done, he would know all of Sam. The good, the bad, and the ugly. And, as much as it terrified him to think, Sam would know all of him. He just hoped Sam would have enough scars to match his. 

—

January 5th, 2003. Election day for the special runoff election in CA-47. Josh sat in a chair in the corner of an unfamiliar war room, watching the TV. The polls had only closed twenty minutes ago, but they didn’t need more time. Perhaps it would have been a less embarrassing defeat if this had been a regular November election, confined only to those interested in a single California House election. But it was a runoff, one that no one saw coming, which meant that the entire country had turned their gaze on Orange County, and they were watching Sam Seaborn crumble. Sam sat on the floor in front of Josh with his arms around his knees, watching his own defeat. Someone handed him a telephone, and with the base clenched in white-knuckled fingers, he conceded to Chuck Webb and congratulated him on a race well-run. He flinched when Josh put his hand on his shoulder. There was quiet as the entire Seaborn for Congress campaign team watched their defeat live on the 9 o’clock news. 

“I’m going to stretch my legs,” Sam said after about fifteen minutes, when he could no longer take it. “Someone needs to go talk to the press.”

“I’ll do it.” Will Bailey held up his hand. He had flown out for the night. “I’m the one who got us here.”

“Thanks, Will,” Josh offered. No one else wanted to speak. Sam stood up and left the room and it was somehow even quieter. Josh followed him after a moment and caught up with Sam halfway to the elevator. Neither of them spoke, but Sam slowed his steps to match Josh’s. 

They slipped out the employee entrance in the back and stood in a dark, empty parking lot, staring up at the moon.

“I’m sorry.” Josh held out his arms and Sam fell into them, burying his face in Josh’s shoulder.

“I knew. I really did, I knew, but…”

“But knowing doesn’t make you feel better.”

“No. It doesn’t.” Sam slipped out of the hug and found a pack of cigarettes in his jacket pocket. He lit one and puffed smoke out at the distant palm trees. Josh grimaced, but didn’t say anything. 

“You can come home now, at the very least. We miss you.”

“It’ll be nice to see everyone again. And it’ll be nice to leave California.”

“I’m sorry,” Josh repeated, only this time he wasn’t sure what he was sorry for. “I’ll be glad to see you at work every day.” Sam let out a slow breath.

“I gave Will my job. I’m not kicking him out.”

“I know. When President Bartlet hired Will, he said he’d make you a senior advisor and strategist when you came back. It’s a promotion, Sam. You’ll outrank me.” Sam smiled a little at that. 

“And that was kind of him. I’m just not sure I can ever show my face in the White House again.”

“Why not?”

“I embarrassed myself. I embarrassed myself by taking on this campaign at all, and I’ve embarrassed myself by losing. Or at least, that’s how a lot of people at home see it. I know. I get their letters.”

“Those letters are from people who don’t know you, Sam.”

“They know me now. They know me well enough that if I come back, the only stories, the only questions C.J.’ll be asked, they’ll be about how the president could possibly hire someone so foolish.”

“You’ve been a fool before, Sam. We all have. I fuck up once a month, and I’m still around.”

“And your name’s in the papers every week, Josh. But that’s not me. I’m a writer. My name doesn’t get put on things. I write for the guy who gets his name put on things. This was my one shot to maybe make the papers on my own terms, and I lost it, and I just want to go back to being the man behind the curtain instead of the wizard.”

“Sam, I love you, but I need you to be a little less self-important and a little less self-pitying right now. The president’s doing a fine job making headlines. You’re a third-page story at most in Washington, and I mean that as a compliment. You make waves in your own way, and while I admire you striking out on this new path, I know you’re more comfortable behind the scenes. I’m telling you that you can come back to that. You haven’t gone too far.”

“Haven’t I?” Sam threw his hands up at the sky. “Every time I try to step away from… from myself, I get pushed right back, like my life is a game of fucking chutes and ladders! Who out there is so angry with me for trying to do something right in my life?! I haven’t been able to do anything right the first time around, and every time I try, something out there decides that I shouldn’t get a second chance! That I’m just fucked!” He threw down his cigarette in a shower of sparks and held tightly to his own arms. “Why can’t I get a shot? Why am I always relegated to second chances and long shots? I don’t know if it’s God or the devil or just some random motherfucker out there pulling the strings, but whoever they are, they’re angry with me and _I don’t understand why!”_ Sam roared the last few words into the empty evening. Josh listened to them bounce around and echo away.

“I know you don’t understand,” he said. “I would be lying if I said I did. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me angry too, angry for you. But these are your cards, Sammy. This is the hand you’ve been dealt and it sucks but you can’t leave the table and you can’t fold. You just have to keep playing until you get some better cards.” Gently, he pried away Sam’s death grip on his own arms. “That’s where I come in. We’re getting married, whether you come back to the White House or not, because I’m on your team. But I need you not to pity yourself. I need you to see yourself the way I do, and the way you have always seen me. I need you to realize that there is no malicious God out to get you. Things just happen, okay? A Democrat isn’t going to win in Orange County, and that’s just the way it goes. And it might not make you feel any better, but feeling bad for yourself doesn’t get you anywhere. So let’s go, you and me, back up to that war room. Let’s thank everyone for their hard work, let’s tell them they did the best they could, let’s go to bed, and tomorrow, let’s go home.”

“Why are you so level-headed?” Sam busied his hands adjusting his tie. “You’re supposed to be the irrational guy. You’re supposed to be the one who yells at the sky and kicks and screams when things go wrong.”

“We’re both that guy. You just do a better job suppressing it than I do. It hurts, I can tell, to push all of that rage back. I figure you deserve a minute to let it go, and I figure one of us has to be the rational one when that happens. I’m okay taking the reins every once in a while if it means you get to feel free.”

“You just get me that well, huh?”

“Yeah, I do. Now, come on. Let’s get inside.” Josh grabbed the end of Sam’s tie and led him along. It was the first bad day of the year. Last year had a lot of bad days. The year before, even more. Bad days were a given, but Josh had to say that the longer he spent with Sam, the closer they got, the less frequently he seemed to notice the bad days. Yes, his calmness was in part an effort to help Sam open up the fiery side of himself that he had tamped down over the years, but it was also just how Josh was beginning to be. He didn’t want to kick and scream and yell at the sky so much anymore. Now, bad days just made him want to come home. And tomorrow, he would. They both would. 

—

September, 2004. Just a day like all other days. After a weeklong break, Sam came back to the White House. He moved out of the communications bullpen and into one of the senior advisor offices across the hall from the Roosevelt Room. That had been about a year and half ago. On the shelves in Sam’s office were his usual stockpile of policy memos and briefings, color-coded and arranged chronologically in binders along one wall. Also on the shelf was another binder, nearly indistinguishable from the rest, neatly labeled _Wedding Plans._ Every once in a while, when he could get a weekend off from the campaign and come back to D.C., Josh came in and sat down and opened up the binder, and he and Sam would talk a little about flowers or cake, and then they would get tired of it and put the binder away. It was odd, the idea of being married sounded so nice, but this wedding planning business was downright painful. Josh’s mother had called once a week when they first got engaged to ask if they wanted help. The calls were less frequent now. Really, if not for the ring on his finger, no one would even have known. Santos knew, Josh told him on one of their first days in New Hampshire. He asked often when the wedding would be and Josh never had an answer.

Josh sat in Sam’s office, waiting for him to get out of a meeting, and listened to the distant echo of Toby’s Spalding pounding against the floor. It was just a wedding, and a wedding wasn’t a marriage. If they could just do it and get past it… why couldn’t they? Why couldn’t they sit down and work it out and have a wedding and be done with it? 

Because they worked, and they loved to work almost as much as they loved each other, and when wedding plans were just one binder among dozens, it was easy to let them fall by the wayside. It was easy to put aside thoughts of vows and flowers and first dances when there was always more to do at work. Sooner or later, though, they would have to get over themselves and actually get married. Sooner or later.

—

April 1st, 2005. Cherry blossoms scattered the sidewalk under Josh’s shoes. He checked his watch again. Where was Sam? They had planned to meet here at 2:30. It was almost 3:00. A hand pressed flat against the small of his back.

“I’m sorry I’m late.” Sam appeared at his side as if out of nowhere. “I got caught up on the Hill.”

“You’re fine,” Josh said and kissed his cheek. “I needed to see you before tomorrow.” Sam grinned and raised his eyebrows.

“Tomorrow. Can you believe it?”

“Honestly? No.” Josh let his head fall against Sam’s shoulder. “Seems like just yesterday, we were falling asleep in that god-awful Austin hotel room.”

“It’s been a long time since then.” Sam looked up and Josh mirrored him, tracing the spires of the National Cathedral all the way up to where they looked as though they scraped the clouds.

“Honestly, I didn’t think I was ever going to get married, much less in a church, much much less in an episcopal one.”

“Things change.”

“Absolutely.” He took Sam’s hand and pulled him forward. “Let’s go in.” The cathedral doors were heavy, but they swung in, and Josh marveled up at the arched ceiling. Neither of them had been to the cathedral since Mrs. Landingham’s funeral four years ago. That was a sad day. Sam had held Josh’s hand in the pew during the service. Today was the polar opposite. The stained glass windows flooded the hall with brilliant light. No one else was here on a Friday afternoon. 

“Did you know you could lay the Washington Monument down on its side in here?” Sam asked.

“Be pretty hard to get it back up.” Josh could hardly see the other end of the church. “Long walk to that altar.”

“You’re not getting cold feet, are you?”

“You aren’t getting rid of me that easily.”

“Oh, I’m never getting rid of you.” They started forward, footsteps echoing on the marble floor. C.J. had forced Sam out of his office at 9 o’clock this morning, or that’s at least what Sam told Josh.

 _“You’re getting married tomorrow,”_ she had said, as if it wasn’t obvious. _“Take the rest of the day off.”_

They had decided to come walk the cathedral together, before Josh’s mother could drag them away for the rehearsal dinner. The more Josh looked around the church, which would be decked out with green roses and calla lilies in about 24 hours, the bigger this all seemed. There must have been 80 rows of pews, all of which would be full tomorrow. Not by Josh’s choice, but because this was both a wedding and a political event. The senators and lobbyists who earned an invite might as well have had the president’s stamp of approval in bright red on their foreheads. That was fine with Josh and Sam, their work was their life, but it made the wedding seem more like a spectator sport. Josh was never much for the spotlight, that’s why he preferred his office deep in the labyrinth of the west wing, far away from the prying eyes of Toby and Annabeth’s press corps. Or at least, he had. With the campaign, with cutting the ‘deputy’ out of Deputy Chief of Staff, all eyes were on Josh. Matt and Helen Santos had, of course, been extended invitations and they would arrive tomorrow morning. Would that be taken as an endorsement, with Josh working for Santos and marrying Josh, who worked for Bartlet? If the American people had any rationale whatsoever, the answer would be no, but they didn’t, so that was a question that had to be considered, and so John Hoynes and Bob Russell had been invited as well. The whole thing was a messy web of connections, and Josh sometimes felt they needed a press secretary just for this one event.

Donna, too, had been sent an invitation. Josh assumed she would say no, but she said yes, probably more for Sam than for him. She was coming, though, along with Will, who had also been invited at Sam’s request, and that was yet another layer of painful insanity that Josh had little interest in dealing with. If he could just blink and skip tomorrow and be on his honeymoon in Hawaii, which they had to cut down to three days so that Josh could be back for the Illinois primary… but he blinked and he was still here. 

“Hey, look.” Sam tapped his shoulder and pointed at the south wall of the cathedral. “That’s the Space Window.” He approached, his face lighting up with an indigo glow. The window was gorgeous, three panels of blue and purple glass with floating red and green planets. “There’s a piece of lunar rock in the glass,” Sam said. “Collected by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. The moon landing was on my first birthday. And now…” He gestured to the window. “Time really is a circle, isn’t it?” And then Josh was struck with an odd idea. It wasn’t even an idea, really, as much as it was the culmination of months of frustration. 

“I don’t want to get married here.” Sam shook his head.

“Too late for that, honey. The reservations have been made, and-”

“No, I’m not suggesting we cancel. I think we should still have the ceremony tomorrow evening with the flowers and the bow ties and the cake. It would be a political nightmare to cancel now, not to mention what I think your parents would do to me. But…” Josh looked at the lunar rock embedded in the window, and then back at Sam. “I think we should get married today.”

“You want to elope?”

“You make it sound like I’m suggesting we run off to Vegas.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“We live in D.C., the legal capital of the western world. You think we can’t find a judge who’ll marry us?” Josh tugged on Sam’s hand and grinned in earnest. “I want to get married on our terms, not your parents’, not my mom’s, not President Bartlet’s, and not Matt Santos’s.”

“So… you want us to get married the day before our wedding, and then show up and get married again like nothing happened?”

“Pretty much. What do you think?” Sam considered momentarily.

“I’m in.” After a moment of shocked silence (he hadn’t really expected Sam to say yes) Josh let out a whoop and threw his arms around Sam’s waist, lifting him off the ground. Sam shushed him, laughing.

“So how do we do this?” he asked, once his feet were back on the ground. “We just… call up a judge?”

“We’ll need a judge, and a marriage license, and a locale.” Josh thought for a moment, and then it occurred to him. “I’ll go to the registrar’s office and get a marriage license, you go find a judge, and meet me at Constitution Gardens in an hour.”

“You’re a crazy person, you know that?”

“And you wouldn’t have me any other way.”

“No, I wouldn’t.” Sam kissed Josh once, so gently he hardly felt it, turned on his heel, and started back towards the door.

“Constitution Gardens, one hour!” Josh shouted after him. Sam turned around and shushed him again, grinning. Josh looked up at the Space Window and the lunar rock embedded in the glass. It had taken a lot of guts, to go to the moon. There were a lot of people relying on Armstrong and Aldrin that day. _One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind._ Josh would never go so far as to say that getting married a day early was any kind of giant leap for anyone but them, but it was a leap he never expected to take. If he could go back in time to Valentine’s Day, 1992, and tell Past-Josh what he was doing today, Past-Josh never would have believed it. He’d never have believed he would be marrying that skinny kid who spent his free time jogging in the rain and who could name the constellations and didn’t know if he could ever accomplish enough to make all of this worth it. But, to be fair, no one expected to do a lot of things until they did them. Had Neil Armstrong expected to walk on the moon until he did it? 

The line at the registrar’s office was shockingly long, but Josh got to the front eventually.

“Hi, I’d like a marriage license.”

“ID?” The front desk clerk looked bored. Josh found his driver’s license and held it out. She nodded. “One moment, please.” She hit a button on her computer and then shuffled over to the printer at the other end of her desk. A sheet of paper came out and she slid it over the desk to Josh. “You sign here, your spouse signs here, your witness signs here, and your officiant signs there. You'll need to bring the license back here, and we’ll have you certificate printed in-”

“I’m sorry.” Josh held up a finger. “Witness?”

“You’ll need a witness.”

“Since when?”

“Since always. This isn’t Las Vegas.”

“As is becoming increasingly obvious to me,” he muttered. “Whatever. Thanks.”

So. They needed a witness. Who? Toby and C.J. were at work, and besides, this was supposed to be a secret. Josh’s mother was hard at work setting up for the rehearsal dinner, and needless to say Sam’s parents weren’t an option. Who was in town and could afford to take an hour off? The first name that popped into his head wasn’t an option anymore. Or was it? He needed an olive branch, maybe this was it. It’d make Sam’s day, too.

It was a long shot that she’d even pick up once she saw that it was him calling, but what the hell? Anything could happen. He dialed a number he didn’t even have to think about to remember. Over the years, he’d probably called that number just as many times as he’d called Sam’s. She picked up halfway through the third ring.

“Donna Moss, how can I help you?” She didn’t look at the caller ID. That was why she picked up so quickly.

“Donna,” he said. She was quiet on the other line.

“Hi.”

“Listen, I know… I know it’s been a while. But you… you’re in town, right? For the wedding?”

“Yeah, I am. I’m looking forward to it.”

“Good. I’m glad. Listen, this is gonna sound insane, but Sam and I are getting married.”

“Yeah, Josh, I know, I’m coming to the wedding.”

“No, I mean, today. Sam’s finding a judge right now, and we’re going to get married at Constitution Gardens in an hour. I just picked up the marriage license, and we need a witness. I’d like you to be there.” Again, there was quiet.

“Why me?” When Donna speaks again, her voice is quiet.

“You’re our friend. No matter what happens, you are, or at least I hope you are. And I… I want you there. I’m frustratingly nervous, and I think having you there’s going to reassure me that eloping the day before my wedding isn’t insane.” 

“I’ll be there,” Donna said without a moment’s hesitation. So she was still Josh’s friend, after all. “Constitution Gardens at 3:45?”

“You got it.”

“Josh?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for inviting me.”

“Thanks for coming.” Donna hung up.

Josh was waiting again, only this time he was waiting with Donna, who arrived at Constitution Gardens in a yellow cab a few minutes after he did. It didn’t take them long to fall back into old patterns. He paid for coffee and they sat on a bench together, poking fun at tourists and talking about their days. They didn’t talk about politics, and that was just fine. 

“Where is he?” Donna asked, tossing her empty coffee cup into a trash can.

“I don’t know. It’s been an hour.”

“Maybe he’s having trouble finding a judge?”

“This is D.C., Donna, we’ve got nothing but judges.”

“Calm down, Joshua. He’ll be here.” She squeezed his forearm and grinned. Josh sucked in a breath and released it, letting some of the tension fall out of his shoulders.

“I like your bangs,” he said.

“Really?” Donna brushed her hair off her forehead. “Thanks. I needed something new.”

“Suits you.”

“You’re sweet to say so.”

“Donna, listen-”

“Josh.”

“No, please let me finish. I’m sorry, okay? You asked me for more responsibility, I didn’t give it to you, and then I had the nerve to act pissy when you quit. It’s my fault.”

“It is. But I’m over it. I shouldn’t have quit the way I did, but it’s all over and done now. And we’re friends, aren’t we?”

“We are.” And that was true.

“Wow, being engaged to Sam really has mellowed you out, huh?”

“I like to think so.”

“It’s nice.” Donna bit her lip. “It suits you.” Josh let his head fall back and he stared up at the cloudless sky over his head. 

“Where is he?” he murmured, shoving his hands in his pockets. 

“There. I told you.” Tugging on his arm, Donna pointed to the yellow cab that crept to a stop at the curb. Sure enough, Sam’s head appeared over the open door. He grinned broadly at Josh and then looked at the woman to his left, puzzled.

“Donna?” he asked. “Is that you?”

“Hey, Sam. Josh said you needed a witness, so here I am.”

“Good to see you.”

“You ready?” Josh asked as he approached. Sam shook his head.

“I couldn’t find a judge.”

“What? Well, then, I guess we’re just screwed.”

“Not exactly. I couldn’t find a judge. I could, however, find a justice.” A woman stepped out of the cab, and Josh felt his jaw drop.

“Madam Chief Justice?” Evelyn Baker Lang smiled.

“Hello, Joshua. It’s nice to see you again. Congratulations, by the way.”

“Thank you, Chief Justice Lang. Sam, sidebar?” Josh grabbed Sam by the shoulder and steered him out of earshot of Justice Lang. “What-? You couldn’t get a regular judge, but you got the fucking Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?”

“I went back to the office to find my rolodex, and there she was, just leaving. I told her about our plan and she offered. What, do you not want to get married by your favorite Supreme Court Justice?”

“Of course I do!”

“Boys?” They both whipped around to see Justice Lang tapping her watch. “I’ve only got an hour, so if we could get this started…” Sam and Josh exchanged a glance and nodded.

“Of course.” Josh ran his fingers through his hair, trying to flatten it, an impossibility. “How do I look?” he whispered to Donna.

“You’re wearing a flannel and jeans,” she replied. “It’s not like this is a black-tie event.” The small quartet found a spot under a willow tree at one end of the pond, away from the crowds of tourists.

“So, what kind of ceremony are you guys looking for? I mean, I can talk for quite a while if you’d like, but-”

“Something short and sweet, if you don’t mind,” Sam interrupted.

“We’re not really big on the whole, uh, ‘wedding’ thing. That’s why we’re getting married a day early. So we can just get over it and get to actually being married.” Chief Justice Lang nodded.

“Got it.” She cleared her throat. “Welcome, everyone—or, I suppose, just you, Ms. Moss—and thank you for coming today as we unite Josh Lyman and Sam Seaborn in marriage. These two have found their way to one another, whether by fate or free will, and have been there for one another through all hardship and all joy. Josh and Sam know better than anyone the kinds of ups and downs that life can bring, and so they also know that love endures all things.” Josh glanced over at Sam, sunlight gently dappling his face, and suppressed a smile. Any and all storm clouds from their youth faded under today’s blue sky. “You both acknowledge that marriage should not be undertaken lightly, but rather with love, loyalty, and friendship as its foundation. Now, I’m hoping you both have some kind of vows put together, because I don’t marry people all that often.”

“I do.” Sam put his glasses on and found a stack of index cards in his back pocket.

“You made flashcards?”

“I _am_ me.” He blinked a couple times and frowned, staring down at the cards. “But I actually don’t think I need these.” 

“No?”

“No.” Donna took the cards and Sam slipped his glasses back into his shirt pocket. “Josh, I wouldn’t be in D.C. today if not for you. I wouldn’t be in the White House, I wouldn’t be working in politics… in short, I wouldn’t be doing what makes me happy without you. At every step of our relationship, you have shown me the things that really matter. You’ve shown me that a small step in the right direction is better than standing still. You’ve shown me that work isn’t everything if you’re not yourself. You’ve shown me that family can just as easily be the people we choose as the people who share our blood. You’ve shown me that hurt and loss and disappointment don’t mean the end. I have endured the darkest nights of my life and the brightest days at your side, and I want you to be there for whatever is yet to come. You and I have seen each other through it all. It’s you and me, Josh. We put three Supreme Court Justices on the bench. We got the president re-elected. We survived gunmen and multiple sclerosis and heartbreak so bad it felt like the end of the world, but you and I are constant. Like the stars in the sky, we are always there. Do you remember the constellation I pointed out to you on the day we met?”

“Columba. The Dove.”

“Well, the myth of Columba says that Noah sent out a dove from the Ark to seek out dry land. When the dove returned with an olive branch, they knew the flood was receding. At the risk of sounding trite, my life was a flood when we met. I was just trying to keep my head above water. And then you came along, and I knew it was all going to be fine. You are my Columba. I look at the stars, and all I see is you, guiding me to dry land.” Sam reached over and brushed Josh’s cheek with his thumb. Josh realized he was crying.

“Oh, god, why’d I have to marry a writer?” he joked, sniffling.

“That was lovely, Sam. Josh?”

“Alright.” He took Sam’s hands in his. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately.”

“That’s rarely a good thing.”

“Babe, I love you, but please shut up.”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway, I’ve been thinking. About you and about me and the way this all started. Because as much as I love you, this wasn’t love at first sight. Before I loved you like I do now, you were my best friend. We knew everything about each other before we even fell in love, and that’s mind-blowing, isn’t it? That you and I have been this close for thirteen years, and we’ve only been together for eight of those. I think that’s why it’s been so easy for me to love you. Because I already know you, and you know me. And it’s easy to love someone who’s seen you at your worst and fell in love with you anyway.” Sam was crying now, and doing a bad job of hiding it. Josh coughed and stepped back. “That’s, uh… that’s all I got. You’re my best friend.”

“You’re mine,” Sam whispered.

“Thank you, Josh. If that’s all, let’s do this, shall we?” Josh chuckled and nodded. “Do you, Sam Seaborn, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, in good times and bad, for richer or poorer, for as long as you both shall live?” Sam didn’t hesitate.

“I do.”

“Do you, Josh Lyman, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, in good times and bad, for richer or poorer, for as long as you both shall live?”

“You bet I do.”

“If there’s anyone present who can show just cause why these two should be married, speak now or forever hold your peace?” Chief Justice Lang raised her eyebrows at Donna, who just shook her head, grinning. “Alright, then. By the authority vested in me by the United States of America and the District of Columbia, before this witness, I now pronounce you married.” Josh glanced at the Justice and pointed at Sam.

“Can I, uh-”

“Go ahead.” Josh kissed Sam, maybe harder than he’d ever kissed Sam before, wrapping his arms around Sam’s neck, winding the two of them together like the gnarled branches of the tree they stood under. 

“Thank you,” he said, pulling away.

“What for?”

“Loving me.” Sam patted his cheek.

“Always.”

“And thank you, Madam Chief Justice.”

“My pleasure, Josh.” They shook hands. “Now, I ought to get out of here, so-”

“Please. We’ve taken up enough of your time.” Their group of four was down to a group of 3 now. Donna wrapped both Sam and Josh in a bone-crushing hug.

“I love you guys.”

“Thank you for being here,” Sam replied.

“I wouldn’t miss it.” She released them from the hug, still holding onto their hands. “And thank Josh for calling me.” 

Donna stayed to chat for a moment, but the sun was beginning to creep into late-afternoon territory, and she had things to do. Waving goodbye, Josh watched her get into a cab and go. He was sure he would see her at the cathedral tomorrow, and he was sure he would see her again after that. That was a good feeling. 

“Wanna take a walk?” Sam asked, offering out his hand. Josh took it and nodded.

“Why not?” They wandered the garden paths in silence for a bit. “So,” Josh said finally. “We’re married.”

“That’s fun, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. It is.” He stopped in his tracks to kiss Sam again. Being married didn’t feel any different. Sam’s lips still tasted like vanilla chapstick and the cigarette he snuck this morning. 

“This was a good idea,” Sam murmured without breaking the kiss.

“I agree.”

“We’re married.”

“I know. Isn’t it wonderful?” Their hands fit together as if they had been sculpted from clay, every wrinkle and bone molded perfectly to complement one another. Josh liked D.C. in April, especially on days like today, when it was unseasonably warm and the sun set the cherry blossoms a glowing red. He didn’t understand why anyone would want to live anywhere else on days like this. 

They walked all the way to the end of the Reflecting Pool. 

“Ice cream?” Sam asked, pointing at a truck down the street.

“Why not?”

“Wait here.” He pulled his hand out of Josh’s and jogged away, leaving Josh to stare up at the Lincoln Memorial. Funny they should make their way back here today, of all days. Josh didn’t believe much in destiny, but it was hard not to assign some meaning to this place and the events that had occurred here. Sam returned and handed him a popsicle.

“What flavor is this? I’m pretty sure this color doesn’t occur in anything natural-”

“It’s a popsicle, Josh. Shut up and eat it.” They sat on the steps at one far corner of the Memorial, away from the tourists. Josh pulled the folded up marriage license out of his pocket.

“We’ve gotta sign this,” he said. 

“Give me a pen and we’ll do it right now.”

“Whoa, slow down. You know, we never really talked about names.”

“What’s there to talk about?”

“Well…” Josh knocked his hip against Sam’s. “Sam Lyman sounds pretty good to me.”

“I like my name. Besides, if I ever run for office, Sam Seaborn’ll look good on the posters.”

“Is that something you’re thinking about doing? Running again?” Sam shrugged.

“Maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t come to any decisions.”

“Huh. Well, I don’t think your name will matter that much if you do.”

“That’s what _you_ think. I like my name. I like that the Seaborn name is associated with something other than my father. I like that I’ve done some good with this name. And, you know, I think Josh Seaborn sounds pretty nice.”

“I’m sure you do. But I’m the last Lyman. I’m my parents’ only living child, and my dad has no siblings. I’m literally the last one.”

“Alright, so then no one’s changing their names.” Sam patted his pockets. “I don’t have a pen.”

“How do you not have a pen?”

“I don’t have a pen!”

“You’re a writer.”

“I just don’t have one.” Sam paused, pushing down a grin. “I’m pretty sure there’s a pen or two back at the apartment.” Josh raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I think we should, uh, head back there. Find one.”

“And that’s the only reason we should go back to the apartment?”

“That’s my only reason, unless you’ve got another idea.”

“I might have an idea or two,” Josh leaned over to kiss Sam, ignoring the popsicle that was beginning to melt in his hand.

“Your tongue is blue,” Sam murmured.

“Yep.”

“You’re going to turn my tongue blue.”

“And?” Sam chuckled and pulled away.

“Come on.” He stood up and held out his hand to Josh. “Let’s go home.” Josh took it and allowed Sam to pull him to his feet. “You know, I’ve never been so thankful someone wasn’t watching where they were going.”

“I still think that was your fault.”

“Yeah, it definitely wasn’t.”

“That’s what _you_ thi-”

“Shut up.”

“Shutting up.” Josh wrapped his arm around Sam’s waist and slipped his hand into Sam’s pocket. A bird took off from a tree and shot over Josh’s head, taking him by surprise in a flash of white. He couldn’t be sure, and it was probably just a pigeon, but it looked like a dove. 

Sam’s head rested against Josh’s bare chest, brown-almost-black hair tickling his chin. Sam’s back rose and fell shallowly with his breathing—he was asleep. They would have to get up and get ready for the rehearsal dinner before too long, but he was so beautiful like this. No tension in his face, snoring quietly, his warm cheek just over Josh’s steady-beating heart. Josh would have stayed here forever if he could, tangled up in bedsheets like he didn’t have a care in the world. He wished they could have gotten to this point earlier, even though they had been together for years. Those years would never be enough, looking back at the emptiness of the years before. If he had known all that was waiting for him all the way back when he was a kid running down the ends of the earth, he might have stopped running sooner. He’d have given anything to have more days like this, with the sun spilling in through the open window, setting a match to the world and giving magic to even the particles of dust floating through the air. 

“What time is it?” Sam rumbled. His voice sent pleasant vibrations through Josh’s chest.

“I don’t know.”

“We should get up.”

“Yeah.”

“…I don’t want to.”

“Me neither.” Josh sits up. “Come on.” He grabbed Sam’s arm and tried to drag both of them to their feet, but his foot caught in the sheets and so he instead sent both of them tumbling to the floor, laughing.

“It would seem the universe doesn’t want us to get up,” Sam said, and looped his arm around Josh’s neck to pull him in for a kiss. At that moment, Josh couldn’t give less of a shit what the universe wanted. All he knew was what _he_ wanted and he wanted Sam and he wanted more lazy afternoons in bed and he wanted this to be his life. He had the world in his hands, between the campaign and his new husband, and he was riding so high he didn’t think anything but God’s own wrath could take them down.

—

November 4th, 2008. Sam and Josh sat on the sofa in their living room with their dog (a greyhound named Lincoln) curled up at their feet. They watched the television as midterm election results rolled in, Sam finally having been able to get Josh out of his office for the night. It was nice, in a lot of ways, to not be working together. Sam had his visiting privileges, as always, but the Santos administration had moved into the building and it was like a switch had flipped for both of them. Sam didn’t seem to want to stay and Josh didn’t offer him a job beyond the usual courtesy offer (which seemed ridiculous, given their five years of marriage).

Sam quietly packed up his office and showed Lou the ropes (he had once again moved offices after Toby’s ‘incident’ and took up his old boss’s job like nothing had happened. He put on a brave face, and Josh remained his silent counsel) and he took one of the job offers that had been piling up on his desk for months. So he moved over to a desk at the MSNBC politics office and Josh moved into C.J.’s old office, formerly Leo’s old office, and that was that.

Sam had just left the office, leaving Steve Kornacki to color in districts in red and blue, as he was doing now on their television. They cheered as OR-4 went to William Bailey, and Josh pretended not to notice Sam’s distaste when CA-47 went to Chuck Webb. Again. And, of course, they watched their own VA-8 fall at the feet of Democrat John Gladman, for the twelfth election cycle in a row.

“He’s been serving for twenty-four years,” Josh bitched as he got up from the sofa to grab a fresh beer. “The only reason he’s still in that seat is because everyone in Virginia who’d want to run is already a representative from another state or works for a representative from another state.” Sam was quiet, which wouldn’t usually have been odd, except that he was tipsy, and Sam was loud when he was tipsy, and that he loved to talk about elections almost as much as Josh did. Tonight, though, he sat on the couch with his legs folded under him and an inconceivably perplexed expression on his face, like he was trying to solve some vast and invisible puzzle. “You know anyone who’d be good for it? I’m gonna be out of a job in two years anyway, and I think a smaller campaign would be nice. Plus, it’d keep me at home more often.” He sat back down. “Sam? Sammy? Hello?” He snapped his fingers in front of Sam’s vacant face, bringing him back to their plane of existence. “Penny for your thoughts?”

“I, um… I’m having an idea.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” Sam turned, unfolding his long legs, so that he faced Josh. “I want to do it. I want to run.” Josh let out a laugh because he didn’t know what else to do. He could see from the look on Sam’s face, though, that they were nowhere in the vicinity of joking right now.

“Really?” Sam nodded earnestly.

“Think about it. I’ve worked for congressmen, I’ve worked for the president, I’ve worked for the D-triple-C, I’m not a politician but I’m not a political outsider either.”

“All of that’s true, but…” Josh scrambled for what he was trying to say. This was insanity. It was. He just needed to put his finger on why. “But you ran seven years ago in California. You can’t just pick up and start over somewhere else,” he said, remembering when Toby had said the same thing that fateful night, the election of ‘02. 

“Can’t I? There’s no rule saying I can’t, and I talked it over with some of my friends at work and-”

“Hold on. You told the press?”

“I didn’t ‘tell the press’, Josh, I asked a couple of friends who happen to be journalists as well as political experts. And they think I’ve got a decent chance if I decide to do it. If I primary Gladman from the left.”

“God, Sam.” At least this time he had the good sense to tell Josh his plan before announcing it to the world. Six years ago, and Josh still couldn’t forget it.

“You think it’s a bad idea?”

“I didn’t say that, but-” Josh sighed and got to his feet. He liked to pace while he thought. It helped to calm his frazzled nerves. He did so in front of the TV, ignoring the chatter of MSNBC’s commentators. Congress was going to go red anyway, it always went red in the midterms when a Democrat held the White House. “I don’t think it’s a bad idea. I think you’re a genius and you could solve all of the world’s problems.”

“Aw, thanks, babe.”

“But-”

“And there it is.”

“But I don’t think now is the time.”

“And why not?” Sam was on his feet now, too. “If not now, when? You were just complaining about Gladman and his lack of challengers. I want to challenge him. So why not?”

“For one thing, we’re already headed toward a rocky road in two years. Santos won’t run for re-election, and I’ll get the boot.” Josh and the president hadn’t discussed re-election yet, but as soon as the words left his mouth, he knew they were true. Santos had never wanted to run in the first place. He had his education bill, now law. He was done, and that meant, de facto, that so was Josh.

“You’ll find a new job.”

“I know I will. But if you run for Congress, there are going to be questions. About if you’re running to keep pushing Santos’s agenda even after he’s out of office.”

“I don’t work for Santos.”

“You’re married to his Chief of Staff.”

“And you and I agree on many things, but I prescribe my politics to my own conscience. No one else’s.”

“Answered like a true politician,” Josh muttered. “I just… I love you.”

“I know you do.”

“But this is a big decision. I mean, the next two years of our life are campaigning, and then two more, and more and more and more. It’s nonstop.”

“Hasn’t that always been our life?” Sam tilts Josh’s chin up with his hand. It’s comforting, and yet Josh can’t help but feel patronized. “We’ve been running campaigns nonstop for years. This shouldn’t be different. It’s not different. Except this time, you know your candidate. You know I can do this. Virginia’s different from California. It won’t be like the last time.” And there it was, the idealism that Josh had never been able to fully understand. It was as if Sam had an infinite well of it to draw from. Josh hadn’t seen it break a single time since losing California. Not once. 

“This is something you want? I mean, really want? This means we don’t buy a house in the next four years. This means we don’t get a day off from the cameras and newspapers for four years. This means we put off having kids for another four years.” Sam registered it all in the blink of an eye.

“It’s worth it.”

“I’m with you. Always.” Josh pressed a kiss to the tip of his nose. 

“God, I love you.”

“I’m well aware.” Sam rolled his eyes and Josh kissed him again, for real this time. Sam would be the best congressman Virginia had ever seen, and he knew that, but there was some unshakeable tension gripping Josh’s stomach. They were always putting their lives on hold for another campaign, but this one would put them at the front, and that was uncomfortable. They weren’t frontmen, they were the guys who put the frontman up onstage. Josh was about to be in a very strange position, at the forefront of a campaign without being able to do much real work on it at all. But this was what Sam wanted, and in the grand scheme of things, he wasn’t asking much. He was asking no more than what Josh had been asking of him for years, since he came and dragged Sam off to New Hampshire. Fair and square. Even Steven. Balanced scales. 

Even so, a bitter taste filled Josh’s mouth. Not bitter towards Sam, but the bitterness of fear and discomfort. He didn’t like change and he really didn’t like change he had no control over. He didn’t like being the one without control, who in two years wouldn’t have a job and would be married to one of the top names in Washington. He was not a trophy husband, but he was beginning to feel like one. Like something shiny and pointless to be sat on a shelf and dusted off once a month to show party guests. 

Except he wasn’t feeling all that shiny the older he got. Sam still had the shine of youth, even as he approached middle age, and Josh wished he knew how. He wished it would rub off on him, somehow. It never did. Every day, they kissed one another goodbye and went off to work, and every day Sam returned home looking freshly polished and Josh returned feeling tarnished.

He was getting old, and losing control of everything but himself, and he just wished the world would stop. If everything could just stop for five minutes, no more orbit around the sun, the earth just hanging there in space like a yo-yo on a string, then he could figure it out. He could catch up to the world that was falling out of reach. He could get his feet back under him.

But the TV went to commercial, and time kept marching on. Josh sat back down, clenching his beer, and tried to relax when Sam lay his head in Josh’s lap. He didn’t need to seek control here. This was their home, and the one place he knew couldn’t fall out of reach. Running his fingers through Sam’s hair and listening to him chatter on about campaign plans, he could almost have been in Sam’s old office, the one in the communications bullpen, listening to Toby’s Spalding bounce off the window, watching their first midterms with a beer in his hand and Sam’s head in his lap. He just had to close his eyes, and there he was. 

—

November 2nd, 2010. The entire Santos senior staff gathered in Josh’s office—cramped together, leaning on one another, arms and legs tangled as they grouped together on sofas and tables and the floor—to watch the flat-screen television that Josh had wheeled in like a schoolteacher on movie day. All of them, Josh and Bram and Otto and Ronna and Lou and Donna and Annabeth and Amy and even the president himself, although he would only be the president for about two more months. The only outsiders in the room were Lou’s fiancee, a pleasant woman whose name Josh couldn’t remember, and Sam. They were here to see who the next President of the United States would be, whether it would be their guy, a mild-mannered progressive named Mark Sellner, or if it would be Matt Skinner, of all people. That didn’t matter so much, though. Everyone knew it would be Sellner, and that allowed a sort of calm excitement to settle over them. No, what they were really here to see was a single congressional election. Virginia’s 8th congressional district. They were here to see Sam win, if he would win. His opponent, Rob Rosiello, put up one hell of a fight in a district that hadn’t gone red since 1982. And Sam, where he sat perched on the edge of Josh’s desk, clearly knew that this was not going to be an easy night. He kept eyeing the phone on the corner of Josh’s desk, like he was prepared to pick it up and concede at any moment. After about twenty minutes of this, Josh put the phone in a desk drawer. The polls closed at eight, and it was nearing nine. 

“It shouldn’t be taking this long,” Sam muttered. “It shouldn’t take an hour to count the rest of the votes from one district.”

“Sam.” Matt Santos’s voice commanded from across the room. “Have a drink. Try to breathe.”

“I’m making an effort, sir.” Sam took the beer that Donna pressed into his hand. She sat on the floor near his legs, her back against Josh’s desk. So much the same, and yet so much different. “Can we check again?” Sam pleaded, and Josh begrudgingly switched the channel to where Virginia’s votes were being counted. 

“…and we now have the results of Virginia’s last congressional election, the 8th congressional district.” There was silence but for Sam’s nails scraping the varnish off of Josh’s desk. Josh reached over and gently pried his white-knuckled fingers away. “We are prepared to call Virginia’s 8th congressional district for Sam Seaborn-” That was the last thing any of them heard from the TV because at that moment, Josh’s office erupted in noise. They were all on their feet, knocking glasses and pizza boxes to the floor. It was as if Sam had won the presidency, or as if they had all run his campaign. But no, they were simply excited for their friend, and with no other skin in the game, this was what they had all come to see. Josh whooped and gathered Sam in his arms, burying his face in Sam’s shoulder, tilting his head just enough that he could see the reactions of the room. It was a room in which love abounded. Sam turned his head to kiss the nearest part of Josh, which just so happened to be his hand. 

Matt Santos kissed his wife’s forehead. They both looked relieved to be done.

Amy threw her arms around Donna’s neck and pulled her in for a messy kiss. Were they together? Josh couldn’t remember. Amy had a tendency to kiss random people when she was drunk.

Bram kissed Otto just for a moment, in the corner of the office that had been abandoned in the noise. Anxiety wrote itself all over his face, and disappeared when Otto grabbed his tie and kissed him again. They reminded Josh much of himself and Sam a long time ago. 

Love. Love flowed through the offices of the west wing along with champagne and the pizza delivery boy. Josh loved Sam, and that was no different than it had been 5 years ago at their wedding, but he couldn’t find an explanation for the feeling he had when Sam disentangled himself from Josh’s arms to pull the phone out of the desk. He had to call Rob Rosiello, and then he would have to drive back to Arlington to give his speech, and Josh would stay here. Josh felt like he’d been sucker-punched, even though Sam’s victory came as no surprise. He wanted to reach for Sam’s collar, pull him back, keep him here in view, but that was never an option. Instead, he congratulated Sam with a kiss and watched him go. Then he turned the TV back over to the presidential election, where it looked like Mark Sellner was taking the lead. Lou was the one who took the remote from him and switched it over to Sam’s acceptance speech, and Josh was embarrassed to think that he hadn’t done it first. Crowds made him uneasy, they always did after Rosslyn. He didn’t like the crowds at Sam’s campaign events, and he really didn’t like the protesters that they always seemed to pass outside said events. So while Sam spoke, Josh stared up at the ceiling and tried not to think. Love and fear and heartbreak and joy left election days discolored and left his mouth dry.

“I’m going home,” he said, grabbing his coat off the back of his chair just as soon as Sam finished his speech. 

“You don’t want to see who wins?” Donna asked.

“I’ll turn it on when I get home.” He slipped out, leaving his friends in his office that would only be his office for 2 more months. Cue “Movin’ Out”. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was going to do after this. Back to Congress? He could work for any senator he wanted to, but no matter who it was, it would be a demotion. Everything would be a demotion. He would turn 50 in 22 days and he had already reached what would be the peak of his career. Getting older seemed more apparent as his hold on the White House weakened. Having kids now meant he’d be in his late 60s by the time they graduated high school. It meant he’d be dead by the time his kids were the age he was now. And Sam, seven years his junior, wasn’t thinking that. He could so easily put off their life for 4 years (2 years now) because when it was over, he would still be relatively young. He still had places to go, from the House to the Senate. Josh could see him in the governor’s mansion. Josh could see him in the White House. Sam wanted more, he always wanted more, he always wanted to be in the room. While he had mellowed out since his youth, that never went away. And the more he chased, the more open he left himself and the less Josh could protect him.

The hunger he saw in Sam was not a stranger. The other half of it lived in Josh. They both were always hungry, eager to go somewhere, anywhere. The only difference between them was that Sam had places to go and Josh didn’t.

He could go home. That was where he could go. Outside the security gatehouse, Josh hailed a cab and directed it across the river to the quiet Arlington apartment that would be empty when he got there. This was the first election night he had ever spent on his own, and with every gentle dip in the road, he hoped it would be the last. He couldn’t take the _alone_ after so much _together_ . And he couldn’t take this feeling that was slowly beginning to etch itself into his mind, bringing him to a dead stop, that he was being left behind. He would _not_ be left behind. He would find a new way forward, a new way up. Somehow.

—

January 27th, 2011. One week ago, Josh shoved everything on his desk into a box, put the box in the backseat of his car, and drove home with absolutely no idea what to do next. Sam was at work and Josh was at home and the tables had turned because now it was Sam who was constantly busy at the Capitol and Josh didn’t even know if he liked politics anymore.

Well, that was a lie. He loved politics. Always had. Always would. But there was no more to do now. He was out of luck, forced into retirement by the cold and unfeeling establishment of democracy. And even if he’d wanted to go beg the new president for a job, he couldn’t, because fucking Mark Sellner had sputtered out in Texas and Pennsylvania and there was a Republican in the White House. 

Fucking Matt Skinner was in the White House. 

A Republican in the White House, a divided Congress. Sam was frustrated with his own inability to get things done, and they both found that the one solace in a hostile world was dinner together, at least three times a week in keeping with the rules they had set down. On those nights, even if there was a late vote, Sam rushed home and made it in time for dessert at least. And Josh… Josh had been learning how to cook, because he very simply had nothing else to do. He wasn’t very talented, but Sam was a good sport and tried everything he made. Tonight, an attempt had been made at spaghetti and meatballs. The pasta had gone cold about an hour and a half ago. Josh was beginning to give up on waiting. _The vote starts at six, so I’ll be home by eight._ It was nearing ten o’clock, and there was no sign of Sam. No texts, no calls, not even an email. Josh was getting restless. He needed a job of his own, something that would make him late for dinner. C.J. had called once a day to check in on the job hunt. She had gone through the same thing four years ago, and so she had advice. Her advice was just to pick an offer and do it. Josh threw out all the offers that had anything to do with Congress. He didn’t want those and even if he did, working anywhere near Sam’s general vicinity would cause problems. So that left teaching or law, and since Josh hadn’t taken the bar after graduating Yale, he had no inclination to do it now. So law was out. Teaching, then. Inspiring the bright young future of America. Handing them the reins that Josh could not quite bring himself to let go of. GW and Georgetown kept offering him positions as a guest lecturer, and maybe he’d take one. 

He would talk it over with Sam. As soon as Sam got home. Which would be soon, it would have to be, because it was nearing 10:30 now, and still no calls or texts or emails. 

“Do you know where he is?” Josh asked the dog, who yawned. “Yeah. I didn’t think so.” Lincoln was tired and so was Josh, and if Sam wasn't coming home, then he might as well have gone to bed. But first, Lincoln’s nightly walk. Josh grabbed a jacket from the coat rack and Lincoln’s leash from its hook and stepped out into the night, allowing himself to be dragged down the block. He realized when they reached the first stoplight that this was Sam’s coat, not his. He realized this when he put his hand in the pocket, trying to find his gloves, and instead found a pack of cigarettes. It frustrated him to no end that Sam could fight against Big Tobacco day in and day out from his seat in the House of Representatives, but he would always come home and step out onto the sidewalk for a smoke. It was simple, silly hypocrisy, because Sam knew damn well that smoking was horrible for him, but for Josh, it was painful to watch the man he loved go against the things he fought for. Addiction wasn’t voluntary, he had to remind himself. And then he would think of how Sam had been trying unsuccessfully to quit for almost two decades, and he felt bad that he ever criticized Sam at all. The cycle repeated itself with every major piece of tobacco legislation, and while Sam laughed it all off, Josh was tempted to scream. Instead, he settled for crumpling up the pack (one of several that Sam probably had stashed away somewhere) and throwing it away. 

“Come on, Lincoln, would you just pee already?” he groaned, shivering. Eventually, three blocks later, the dog did his business, and Josh walked them back to the apartment. The light inside was on. He’d turned it off before they left, he was sure of it. 

Plates clattered in the kitchen as Josh hung up his coat and unleashed the dog. He made no attempt at greeting, just went to the kitchen counter and leaned there, staring at his husband’s back. Sam’s coat was tossed over a chair. The spaghetti plates had disappeared from the table, and judging by the red splatter on the edges of Sam’s rolled-up sleeves, they would not be eating dinner together tonight.

“Long night at work?” Josh asked. Sam jumped, the plate in his hands slipping away and landing in the sink with a noise Josh was sure meant it was broken.

“Christ, Joshua.”

“Sorry.” He held up his hands in mock apology.

“It was a long night, actually. There was some kind of stupid filibuster in the Senate, so they didn’t even get to voting until nine.”

“And… your phone died?”

“Hmm?”

“You didn’t call. Or text. I would have put dinner in the oven for you.”

“Oh.” Sam paused. He seemed surprised that Josh even noticed his absence. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Josh entered the kitchen fully now, slipping past Sam to the sink to fish out the shards of pottery. “Just try to remember next time, okay?”

“Absolutely.” Sam wrapped his arms around Josh’s middle and kissed the back of his neck.

“How was the vote?”

“Hmm.” Sam grumbled.

“So, not great, then?”

“No. Not great. Really fucking not great., actually. The fucking-”

“Sam.”

“Right. Well, anyway, I stayed two hours late to see a vote on a bill I co-authored that didn’t even pass.”

“I’m sorry.” Josh tossed the shattered plate in the trash and wiped his hands on a dish towel. “Listen, I’m headed to bed. You coming?” Sam hesitated, but shook his head.

“I’ve got to wrap up a few things tonight if I want to have any free time this weekend.”

“Will you? Have some free time?”

“I think so.” Sam reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a can of Coke. “Any new developments on the job front?”

“I’m going to look into those guest lecture offers. One of them’s got to be interesting, right?”

“Whatever you do, I’m sure you’ll be perfect.” He disappeared into his office and Josh was alone again. He didn’t want to be perfect. He’d settle for feeling like he was doing something other than biding his time until retirement became a realistic option. He just had to find some kind of way not to become a relic of presidencies past.

From bed, he could hear the low thump of rock music from Sam’s office that meant he was working. Josh would have given anything to be in that office, working alongside Sam again. Instead, he just rolled onto his side, slammed a pillow over his ears, and went to bed. 

—

May 12th, 2012. Josh stood backstage at yet another Seaborn for Congress campaign event. He watched Sam on the TV, rather than through the wings. The picture was grainy, but he didn’t have to look at the crowd. Sam spoke well, as always, but Josh wasn’t really listening. It was the same thing he’d heard Sam rehearse in the bathroom mirror nightly for a week. In the apartment, it was all campaign, all the time. The campaign wasn’t what Josh minded. It was that Sam seemingly forgot about what they’d left on the back burners to do it. Josh never forgot, though. He couldn’t make himself forget. He tried to ignore the ‘For Sale’ signs on houses he liked and he pretended not to be jealous of Toby and his children. He tried to remember that Sam was a good congressman, the most progressive Democrat that Virginia had seen in half a century. It wasn’t enough, though, and they were headed for two more years of the same, and Josh felt himself tearing at the seams. 

“Was I good?” Sam asked, running his hands through his hair. That dark brown-almost-black hair had a streak of gray in it that seemed to appear almost overnight. 

“Great.” Josh squeezed his hand. “Are we good to go?”

“We are.” They used the back exit, as always. Sam made a beeline straight for the car, but Josh lingered in the parking lot. He kicked a puddle, sending water splattering across the pavement, turning it silver. It had rained while they were inside. 

“Josh?” Sam leaned against the hood of the car, turning back to look at him. “Are you coming?”

“What are we doing?” Josh asked, staring at the rippling water. It looked like mercury leaking from a broken thermometer.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean… what are we doing? Is this what we’re doing for the rest of our lives?” He gestured back at the building.

“I don’t know. I like this work. I have a purpose. But we can talk about this, Josh. Just not tonight. Not until I’ve won or lost. Then there’ll be a new election cycle, and we can make new plans.”

“I don’t-” Josh felt like a child, unable to articulate his words. He was pouting, and he hated himself for that. “I don’t want new plans! I want our old plans. We talked about buying a house and having kids and raising our kids differently than your parents raised you.” Sam winced at the mention of his parents. Ordinarily, that’s when Josh would have cut himself off, but he couldn’t. The stitches that held him together were unravelling. “Are we going to have kids, Sam? We said we would, but I’m closing in on my mid-fifties and it seems like the thought of kids hasn’t crossed your mind for almost a _decade!_ I’m happy you’ve found work that gives your purpose but I don’t know what the hell I’m doing right now. We had plans. Now, it seems like we don’t. I need you to tell me what we’re doing.”

Sam grimaced and sucked on his teeth. He dug through his pockets until he found a cigarette, which he stuck between his teeth and lit it. That was it, Josh couldn’t take it anymore, _he couldn’t fucking take it._

“Would you cut that shit out?” He stormed forward and ripped the cigarette out of Sam’s mouth, casting it aside into a puddle, where it fizzled out.

“What the fuck-”

“You’re going to kill yourself with those things. My children will not lose their father to cancer, Sam. My children will not lose their father the same way I lost mine.”

“And they won’t-”

“They will if you keep that shit up!” Josh yelled. He couldn’t keep his voice down, not that he was trying to.

“No, they won’t, because I’m not having kids!” Sam yelled right back. Josh stumbled backwards like Sam had sucker punched him. He fell flat on his ass into a puddle and knocked Sam’s hand aside when he tried to help him up.

“What?”

“I can’t. Kids… I can’t.”

“You-” Josh pushed himself to his feet, choking on his own words. There was no explanation because he had _said-_ “You _said-”_

“I know what I said.” Sam’s voice was hoarse, but firm. “Don’t ever think for a minute I don’t remember what I said. And I am sorry that I… I can’t do what you wanted.”

“What the fuck, Sam?” Josh whispered, pulling his coat around himself. He couldn’t decide if the question was rhetorical or not. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier? We’ve been married for _seven years, FOR FUCK’S SAKE!”_

“I _know!”_ Sam roared back. “I know. And I didn’t tell you earlier because for the last seven years, I thought… I thought what I said was right. I thought that if you wanted kids, I could get past how much my parents fucked me up. I thought I could.”

“Why? What changed?”

“My father.” Sam straightened his spine and his face sobered and Josh remembered seeing him do the same thing the first time Josh met his parents. He was a man transformed. Not-Sam in Sam’s body. “He’s dead.” Neither of them moved a muscle.

“What? When?”

“Last week. My mom said that… she said they were at the divorce lawyer’s office. Finalizing the terms of the settlement. They finally got around to it, the bastards, and my dad just… keeled over. Heart attack. He was dead before the EMTs arrived.”

“Sam-” Josh stepped forward and grabbed Sam’s arm. “I’m sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What was there to say? We’ve spoken maybe once since the wedding. Apparently, he was refusing to give my mother her half of their savings. He was a jackass until the end.”

“He was your father.”

“Yes. He was.” The silver streak in Sam’s hair looked like mercury, too. 

“I don’t know how this all fits together. I’m not like you. I’m not good at solving puzzles.” Sam managed a weak grin. 

“My dad died being hated by his only son. He died after a lifetime of being a horrible husband and an even worse father. And he is the only example of fatherhood I have ever had. I will not do that to my own kids, and the only way I can avoid it is to avoid raising children entirely.”

“Sam. You’re not your father-”

“I am. I wake up every day and I see him in the mirror.” Sam turned away and looking at just his side profile, Josh could see the unfortunate shadow of Steve Seaborn etched in his son. “My hair gets grayer and my face gets wrinkled and I see him every single day. I’m not going to risk another fucked-up generation of Seaborns. Not when I didn’t even have a good chance to tell my father how badly he fucked me up.”

“So that’s just… done? Over? Because you and your dad had a shitty relationship?”

“Josh-”

“No.” Josh could feel his face flood with heat. “I don’t know if you’ve forgotten, but you’re not doing this alone, Sam. You’re doing it with me, and I had a fantastic fucking father who loved you, and I know you’re going to be a good dad. I know it.”

“Josh. I know that I’m the villain here. I don’t mean to be, but I am. If I’d known I wouldn’t… I never would have told you we’d have kids. But I know now that I can’t do it. It’s too much, and I’m not risking it. Are you…” Sam’s hands trembled as he extended them to Josh. “Are you okay with this? Can you handle it? I understand if you can’t-“

“I love you. And I wanted kids. But-“ Josh twisted the wedding ring on his finger. “I want you more. I can do this. But I need us to be a team again. I need us to make a new plan together. I need to know what we keep and what we lose. I need you to make that concession.”

“It’s not a concession. It’s what we’re supposed to do.” _Supposed_ to do. Were they supposed to do anything? Was that how a good marriage was supposed to work? Josh supposed Sam probably had no idea. He couldn’t be blamed for the sins of his parents. It was unusual, though, how little Sam thought himself capable of change. Josh had spent the last 20 years watching Sam change. He had become a new person a dozen times over, the constant reinvention of someone who never fit properly in his own body.

“I want to go home,” Josh said. “I’m tired.”

“Okay. Let’s go home.” And here, too, was a new version of Sam. This was the version of Sam who had broken Josh’s heart for the first time, and knew he had. It was an unnerving thought, that they were both fully aware of the pain caused and yet were both entirely incapable of repairing it. This could never be fully repaired. The best they could do was stitch up what had been broken and wait until it scarred over.

—

August 8th, 2012. Sam was talking strangely. He’d never been much concerned with his image before—he was allowing gray to overtake his hair, and he’d taken to wearing his glasses all the time. And although he was getting older, he still looked young, somehow. Something about his smile and his eyes. Josh just looked old. His hairline continued to recede, and although his hair stayed brown, the lines around his eyes and mouth deepened. 

But he talked about his image now, while Josh half-listened.

“Nora says-” Nora Walker was Sam’s campaign manager. She was direct and occasionally abrasive, which Josh rather liked. “-that I’m starting to seem old. That my appeal as a ‘young progressive’ is starting to disappear.”

“You’re forty-five.”

“And the Republicans are putting up a thirty-two year old.”

“You’re not old, Sam.”

“Liar.”

“I’m not old, and you’re younger than me.” Sam just raised his eyebrows. “Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking it.” It wasn’t often that they got back in their groove, trading jokes at lightning speed, but it made Josh feel a little less old, and a little less angry. He wasn’t really angry with Sam anymore, but angry with everything. With getting older. With becoming obsolete. “So? What’s Nora’s plan?”

“She doesn’t have one. She just says if I want to keep appealing to younger generations, I have to seem ‘cooler.’”

“So, what, you’re going to get Twitter?”

“You’re funny. No.” Sam paused, folding his arms across his chest. They sat at the small, battered table in the kitchen. Sam had his legs kicked up on the chair beside Josh, and Josh sat in a backwards-facing chair, his legs straddling the backrest and his arms leaning on the top. “There’s actually-” he snorted. “You’re going to think this is stupid.”

“Possibly. What?”

“I’ve been thinking about getting a motorcycle.” Josh laughed. He had missed this.

“You thinking about starting up a Sons of Anarchy caucus?”

“I’m serious.” Sam wasn’t laughing, but he did crack a grin.

“Really? You think this is the best option to appeal to a younger demographic?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Honestly, it’s not about that so much.”

“Then what? Just a regular old mid-life crisis?”

“Josh.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. I’ve been thinking about it for awhile. It’s better for the environment, it’s cheaper than a new car, it’ll get me to work faster-”

“Oh my god, you’re serious.” The smile dropped off Josh’s face. He tried not to look horrified. Between them, Sam had always been the clean-cut, cautious one. He wasn’t a biker. He drove a Honda. He had two alarm clocks. He kept a fire extinguisher in the kitchen, for Christ’s sake. Smoking was his one vice, and even that was beginning to come to an end. Josh couldn’t see where this all had come from, because it certainly had not come from Nora. 

“Yes, I’m serious. So? What do you think?” He thought it was the craziest fucking thing Sam had ever said. He thought it was ridiculous. He thought it was idiotic. If Sam wanted to seem younger, he could dye his hair, he could get a tattoo, he could ride Heelys through the halls of the Capitol. There were plenty of things he could do that wouldn’t get him killed.

Josh said none of that. He had never been able to change Sam’s mind before. No point in trying to start now. He was a stubborn son-of-a-bitch who had married another stubborn son-of-a-bitch, and the side effects of stubborn-son-of-a-bitch-squared were disagreements that would never be resolved, and were therefore better not to have.

“Fine. Just be careful.” Something flickered across Sam’s face, deepening the crease between his eyebrows, and then it was gone. 

“I- really?”

“Why not? You’re smart, you’ll wear a helmet, and it’s not like we’ve got any kids to cart around.” Sam flinched. 

“Josh-”

“I’m sorry. That was a shitty joke.” He smiled, but there was something artificial about it. 

“Okay, then. I was gonna head to the dealership on Monday. Would you like to come?”

“I can’t. I have class.”

“Oh. I can go another day.”

“No, that’s fine. I don’t plan on riding that monstrosity. I’ll stick safely within the four walls of my car.” Before Sam could implore him any further, Josh got up. “I’ve got lesson plans to prep. Do you mind if I-”

“No, go ahead.” Sam bit his lip, but didn’t say anything more. “Josh?” 

“Hmm?” Josh stopped at the door to the home office, now more his than Sam’s.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.” He crossed the room back to the table in a few long strides and leaned down to kiss Sam in a way he didn’t think he’d kissed Sam in a long time. He felt a little of the bitterness leave his body. Not all of it, but enough that he could look Sam in the eye. After all, this wasn’t the first bad idea Sam had ever had, and Josh would have a lot more bad ideas than that by the time they were all over and done with. 

A motorcycle wasn’t Sam, but maybe Sam just wasn’t Sam. Maybe this Sam rode motorcycles and was afraid of getting old. Josh didn’t know, and he was too tired to worry about how much his husband had changed. In 20 years, someone was bound to change quite a bit. And the fear that made bile rise in his throat until he quietly disappeared into the bathroom to vomit—that was just something he was going to have to get used to. Sam wasn’t afraid. He shouldn’t be afraid either. And yet.

—

December 1st, 2012. Josh taught a class at Georgetown on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He was teaching when his phone rang. The first thing that occurred to him when he saw that the caller ID was Georgetown University Hospital was that Carl, a friend and colleague who worked at the hospital a few blocks away. He declined the call and put his phone back in his pocket. 

“Sorry about that,” he said to his students. “Where was I?” The phone rang again. Josh sighed. “Give me a minute.” He stepped out into the hallway and answered.

“Hello?”

“Good afternoon, is this Joshua Lyman?” Not Carl. Josh felt his throat constrict, but he managed to choke out a-

“Yes.”

“Mr. Lyman, are you the emergency contact for Samuel Seaborn?” Oh, Christ. Josh stumbled backwards, pressing his back flat against the wall. _Come on, Dr. Keyworth, don’t fail me now,_ he thought. 

“Yeah. That’s my husband” The words left his body along with all of his oxygen, like he’d been punched in the stomach. The doctor or whoever it was on the other line paused. They sounded young.

“Mr. Lyman, your husband was in an accident.” That was the last thing Josh actually registered hearing. The rest was just noise. Sam An accident. It was that stupid fucking motorcycle, wasn’t it? Josh hung up the phone, not particularly caring if he was cutting off the person on the other end. He sucked in a couple of unsatisfactory breaths and was suddenly torn out of his body, back on a gurney, being carted through the halls of a different hospital. He was hardly conscious then, but Sam was there. The whole time, Sam was there, shouting his name.

_Josh! I’m here!_

New Hampshire. He was in New Hampshire, for some reason.

_You went to New Hampshire. We both did. You came and got me._

Sam was there the entire time, and Josh was still standing in this fucking hallway, trying to catch his breath. He ducked his head back into the lecture hall just for a second, just to say he was going and wouldn’t be back and there was no homework. He left his coat and briefcase on his desk and he just ran, out the front of the building and up the sidewalk. No sense in waiting for a cab, it was just a few blocks, and he could get there quicker on foot. The freezing air coated his lungs and turned his face and hands a brilliant shade of red, but still he ran, all the way across campus to the hospital. 

_Sam. Sam. Sam. Sam Sam Sam SamSamSamSamSamSAMSAMSAMSAMSAM-_

“Sir?” All of a sudden, he was in the hospital waiting room, and he couldn’t quite remember getting there. A nurse tapped his shoulder gently. “Sir, are you-”

“I’m fine. I, um… I got a call- my husband- I-”

“Are you Joshua Lyman?”

“Yes. Sam-”

“Your husband is in surgery.” The nurse, a baby-faced kid who couldn’t be more than 25, guided Josh to a seat.

“What, um-” Josh rubbed a hand over his face. He’d forgotten to shave this morning, and his 5 o’clock shadow was coming in in bristly patches. “What happened?” 

“There was a vote at the Capitol today, right?” They knew Sam was a congressman. Of course they did, this was a D.C. hospital, but still. If the hospital staff knew, the press knew, and if they press knew, the world knew. 

“Yeah. There was. He was going to leave at ten and… yes.”

“He must have been headed that way. It wasn’t supposed to be as cold as it was today, which I’m guessing is why he was riding his motorcycle. The bridge was icy, though, and there was an accident early this morning that caused a pile-up.”

“Oh, god. He crashed his bike?”

“No, actually. He stopped in time to avoid crashing. The perks of driving a small vehicle, I suppose. No, he was trying to help a woman who had crashed out of her car, and another car came along. A truck. It couldn’t stop in time. Your husband pushed the woman he was helping out of the way, but-”

“But he was hit.”

“Yes.”

“And-” A laugh bubbled up and out of Josh’s mouth before he could stop it. It was just that his next question was so ridiculous. “And is he alive?”

“Yes, Josh. He’s alive.” Relief flooded his body, followed almost immediately by stone-cold dread.

“But he’s in surgery.” The nurse sighed and pushed up his glasses. 

“The pickup managed to slow down to about 35 miles an hour before it reached the pile-up, which sounds bad, but considering that any faster would almost certainly have been fatal for your husband, that is a good thing. Also good was that Sam was still wearing his helmet, which protected him from any major brain damage.”

“Would you just tell me what’s wrong with him?” Josh pleaded.

“Okay. He sustained a minor concussion, two broken ribs, a punctured lung, a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, and one of his legs is broken in three places, plus some fairly minor cuts and bruises. He’s in surgery right now to repair his lung and set his leg, and barring any complications, he should be alright. I’ve got to go attend to some other patients, will you be alright here?” Josh managed to stammer out a ‘yes’ and then he was alone. So it wasn’t the motorcycle after all. That was a stupid little joke the universe had been playing on him for the last few months. All the fear he had about the motorcycle, and Sam got into his first accident when he got off of it. He shouldn’t have gotten off, either. What kind of crazy motherfucker goes out into the middle of the road to rescue a woman stuck in her car? The same kind of crazy motherfucker who’d tackle C.J. out of the way of a bullet, that’s who (C.J. told Josh about Sam’s bravery one night when she got drunk and let it slip. Sam didn’t know he knew.)

It wasn’t just about danger. Sam always had a thing for diving in headfirst even when he had no idea how deep the water was. That was how he wound up following Josh to New Hampshire, and then following Will Bailey to California, and challenging Gladman for VA-8. Sam had a nasty proclivity for self-destruction, and Josh didn’t think he was even aware of it. 

But that was a conversation for another time. Josh’s thoughts were pure chaos, and it would take a long time for him to decipher them. He fell asleep thinking about chaos theory.

The same nurse woke him up a half hour later to tell him that there was a complication in surgery. Sam had thrown a pulmonary embolism, but he was fine now. Josh fell back asleep and dreamed of his father.

This time, he was woken up by Sam’s doctors. _Sam would be fine,_ they said, _in almost every way._

 _Almost?_ Josh had asked. 

_There will likely be some permanent damage to his knee,_ the doctors said. _We won’t know how severe until it heals and he starts putting weight on that leg again._

Then they led him to Sam’s room. He spent a long while standing outside the door, staring at Sam through the window. A purple-black bruise blossomed on Sam’s cheek, just below a series of shallow red cuts held together with butterfly bandages, where ice or glass or gravel had cut his face. His arm was set in a splint. He looked almost fine, actually, aside from the cast that covered his entire right leg. Was this how Sam felt, seeing him in his hospital bed with a bullet in his stomach? He remembered thinking about Before and After. This moment too, had a Before and it had an After. Only Josh was on the outside of it all, watching himself and Sam shift from one life to the next. 

Why were all hospital rooms so cold? He shoved his hands in his pockets and jumped a little at the _click_ the door made as it swung shut behind him. 

Sam was 44 now, and could just as easily have been the 24-year-old he was when they met. Asleep, he looked so young. The lines in his face seemed to smooth away, and Josh hardly noticed the gray in his hair. Sam’s glasses were sitting on the bedside table. A spider-web crack etched its way through one of the lenses. Funny, the juxtaposition between something as delicate as a pair of glasses and the amount of violence that had brought them to this place. And funny that someone as resilient as Sam was lying in bed with pins in his leg and stitches in his lungs while his glasses, which should have shattered on impact, had just a single crack. He would laugh, but it wasn’t actually all that funny.

Josh tried to imagine what it was like for Sam to sit at his bedside, almost a decade ago. He tried to imagine himself in this bed, looking half-not-dead (not alive, not quite) with a blanket over him and his eyes shut, getting the first good night’s sleep he’d gotten in maybe 3 years. Was this God’s way of telling Sam he needed a rest? If so, it was a stupid way to say it. To waste Josh’s fear and Sam’s good nature on something as simple as a pickup truck that couldn’t stop on an icy bridge. It was a miracle he hadn’t been knocked into the water to drown, and another miracle that he was alive at all.

“H.R. 1280 passed,” Josh said. He’d heard it was good to talk to coma patients, that it helped keep their brains stimulated or something. Sam wasn’t in a coma. He kept talking anyway. “I thought you’d like to know. I know that bill was your baby.” _And I guess you’ve got the time to make a bill your baby since we don’t have one of our own, ha-ha._ Josh bit his own acid tongue. He saved the bitterness for frustrating students and the conservative protesters on campus. The bitterness was never-ending now, the kindness Josh once had in his youth having gone up in smoke. He had a well of it inside him, held back by a Hoover Dam of resolve. Cracks formed, long, spider-web cracks, and his resolve weakened year by year, argument by argument, sleepless night by sleepless night. 

Sam could not ever be on the receiving end, though not because Josh was simply incapable of bitterness towards him. That may have been true when they were young, but as Josh was constantly reminded, they were not young anymore. 

No, this was a conscious effort now. The impossibility came not from inability but from unwillingness. Josh had the ever-present feeling that if he allowed himself to direct his venom at Sam, there would be no turning back. The dam would shatter and he would not be able to stop until he had spoken himself dry, leaving only an empty, caustic man with no love and no grace.

“I’ve spent more time trying to convince myself I’m not angry than I have making any effort to stop being angry.” Speaking the truth aloud to a silent room made it seem less miserable. “I like being angry. It’s comforting. Is that a bad thing? Does that make me a shitty person?” Sam didn’t answer, of course he didn’t, he had a tube in his chest draining fluid from his lung. “I’ve never made the mistake of thinking I was perfect, and I’ve never made the mistake of thinking you were either, but I think I thought we were perfect for each other.” Josh sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand over Sam’s. “I know it’s fucked to realize that we’re not… soulmates, or whatever. I love you, more than is probably good for me, but I do. I just don’t think we’re the perfect match I told myself we were. I don’t think running into you that day on the Mall was a miracle. Or fate. I think it just happened, and I think sometimes things just happen and we should be okay with the happening and not need the great biblical explanation. There are miracles, though. You surviving today was a miracle. I believe that. I don’t believe in anything else, but I believe in that.” He pulled over a chair and sat in it, still clinging to Sam’s hand the way a child clings to his mother’s hand in an unfamiliar grocery store, or the way a drowning man clings to a piece of wreckage from his capsized ship.

“My father was dying so long that I stopped being terrified. I stopped being scared when I left my house every day that he would be dead when I got home. He took six years to die. I got six years with my dad when I didn’t even know if I’d get two. You and I are supposed to have a whole fucking lifetime. You’re not sick. You’re not dying, not any faster than I am. And yet I leave the house every morning terrified for you— _of_ you. Because you might not be sick, but you ride a motorcycle and smoke like you’re invincible and you go into work past crowds of pissed-off protesters with guns who’d rather see you dead than in the House of Representatives. I have never been able to decide whether you’re brave or stupid, but it doesn’t matter, because I wake up every morning and I am sick to my stomach thinking about what you’re going to inflict upon yourself on any given day. I don’t know if you were born without a self-preservation instinct or if you just choose to ignore it, but it was only a matter of time before this happened. And if it wasn’t this, it would have been something else. A head-on collision or cancer from those stupid cigs or a Nazi with a gun.” All things he’d seen before, Josh realized. Car crashes and cancer and Nazis with guns. He had had quite enough of history repeating itself. “I need us to not be teetering on the edge of a cliff for a while, okay, Sam? I need us to be okay, are-” Josh leaned forward, resting his forehead against the plastic siding of Sam’s hospital bed. “Are we okay?” he asked the floor, squeezing his eyes shut. And then, like a wave or a sudden thunderstorm, he started to cry. 

When was the last time he had cried? Honestly, he couldn’t remember. But he had rarely cried in public, and he had never cried in front of Sam. Not in 20 years. Not once.

Something twitched in his hand and Josh’s head snapped up. He was red and puffy and gasping for air, but he managed to blink away enough of the tears to see Sam’s eyes flutter open, glassy gunmetal irises disappearing as his pupils dilated. He sucked in a breath like he had been drowning.

“You’re crying.” Josh let out his air in a dry huff.

“You’re observant.”

“Josh.” Sam’s voice was hoarse and raspy and not his own.

“I’m okay.” Josh wiped his cheeks with his free hand. “How are you feeling?”

“I’ve got a headache like there’s a nuclear war in my skull. But, considering I was hit by a truck a couple hours ago, could be worse.”

“So you remember.”

“Yeah, I remember. The woman in the car-”

“I think she’s okay.”

“Good.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“What?” Josh got up and poured Sam a cup of water from the plastic pitcher across the room.

“You. Are. An. Idiot. What the fuck were you thinking?”

“I was trying to help-”

“I know you were.” There it was again, the bitterness, pushing at the boundaries holding it back with a vengeance. “I’m sorry.” He set the cup on the table and sat back down.

“You’re right. It was stupid. But I wanted to help.”

“You always do.” Sam yawned, and the bitterness faded. “Get some sleep.”

“I just slept.”

“You just had surgery,” Josh corrected. “Get some real sleep. I’ll be here.” Sam hummed semi-contentedly and closed his eyes again. Josh thought he was asleep, but then—

“I love you.” It was so quiet and small. Just three words. Not empty, but not big enough to hold much weight.

“Yeah. I love you too.” Saying it felt like saying it for the first time. Which is to say, like there was a mayday alarm ringing in his head that would never turn off. Danger and disaster and the greatest love he had ever known set Josh’s nerves on fire. He understood why people loved skydiving now. Because that fear, in small doses, pulled you to a higher plane of existence. There was a time when loving Sam meant that same adrenaline, in short spurts that then dissipated to normalcy. Then the short spurts got closer and closer together until life became one big adrenaline rush and Josh could never seem to lower his heart rate to normal. 

So he was skydiving, plummeting through the air with no parachute strapped to his back and no idea how long he had been falling, only that his fall seemed eternal. He was getting closer to the ground now, he was sure of it. Eventually, he would have to land. Or crash.

—

February 14th, 2013. Valentine’s Day. Josh had a date. 

Well, not really.

He had somewhere to be, at any rate, and that was better than having nowhere to be. 

In the cold, it took him two tries to start the car, even though it had only been cooling on the street for ninety minutes. He pulled out with a caution that had never existed before now, and drove a perpetual 3 mph under the speed limit. Occasionally, he forgot why he drove so slowly now, and then he would come home and see the motorcycle sitting by the meter, the motorcycle that hadn’t been touched in two months although it was in near-perfect condition, because its driver was as far from near-perfect as he had ever been. A week in the hospital until his chest tube could be taken out, six weeks on crutches, and the last three weeks in physical therapy, from which Sam returned angrier and more exhausted than Josh had ever seen him. He had gone back to work despite the many protests of Josh and his doctors, but Josh could see the frustration mounting at his injury. He despised having to shuffle down the aisle in the House chambers on crutches, he despised needing Josh’s help to get in the shower, he despised his own body for betraying him.

There was one benefit to all of this, as dark as that may have sounded. Sam couldn’t smoke. Not with his lung as fragile as it was. This time, when the doctors told him he had to quit, he had, cold turkey, and spent the next month with a short temper, a pounding headache, and a cough like the end of the world, sleeping even less than usual. After awhile, the headache and the cough and the insomnia all faded and the short-burning fuse remained. How could he be blamed? He couldn’t be blamed and he didn’t want to be pitied and Josh remained not quite knowing how to feel. 

His car pulled into the lot outside the physical therapy facility that he drove Sam to 3 times a week. Almost always, he just sat in the parking lot until Sam hobbled out, swearing at the icy pavement with dark lines under his eyes. Today, he pulled the keys out of the ignition and went inside. 

“Can I help you?” A young blonde receptionist tucked a phone between her ear and shoulder and covered the receiver so she could speak to Josh.

“I’m just here to pick someone up. My husband. Sam Seaborn.” She gave him a cloying smile and tapped a few buttons on her computer.

“He should be done in a few minutes. You can have a seat.” The waiting room was lined with windows that looked in on the actual facility. It wasn’t too crowded on a Wednesday morning, only a few patients lifting weights or ambling on treadmills. And Sam. Josh watched him pass his crutches to the physical therapist at his side and wrap his hands stiffly around a set of parallel bars. The wiry muscles in his upper arms flexed, and he took his first step forward with his good leg. Then a second step, this time with his bad leg. It wobbled under him, but held steady in the brace that was now constantly wrapped around it. He took another couple of steps. _Left leg. Right leg. Left leg. Right l-_

His right knee gave out and he went down. Josh resisted the urge to bust in and help him up. The physical therapist tried to help him, but Sam waved her off. His back remained to the window, and he didn’t stand up. He just sat on the ground, his one good leg curled up to his chest. He was in an unreachable place. Even if Josh could get inside and go to him, he would still be a world away.

Sam’s physical therapist was at the reception desk, handing the receptionist a clipboard. Josh stopped her before she could go back inside. 

“Hi, sorry, um-” He winces. This is stupid, but he has to know. “My name is Josh Lyman.”

“Sam’s husband.”

“Yeah. That’s me. I just…” He bit his lip. “How is he doing? He doesn’t like to talk about it, but I want—I _need_ to know how he is.”

“He’s making progress. He is. The muscle in his right leg is getting stronger, and he’s getting closer to being able to walk without crutches. But it was a bad accident, Josh, and his knee was a bad break. He’s showing early signs of post-traumatic osteoarthritis.”

“What does that mean?”

“The cartilage in his knee joint is wearing out quicker than normal. It’s likely he’ll need some kind of mobility aid, probably no more than a cane. We can treat it with pain management and exercise, but I’m afraid it’s just one of those inevitabilities that comes with a bad break.”

“…oh.” Josh glanced through the window at Sam, still sitting on the floor.

“I’ll let him know you’re here.” Josh watched the physical therapist walk back over to Sam. She helped him to his feet and got him his crutches. She said something, and Sam’s back stiffened. He looked back over his shoulder for only a second and grimaced. Josh gave him a small wave, which Sam did not match. He just cast his eyes toward the floor and limped on his crutches towards the waiting room.

“You didn’t have to come inside,” he said. 

“I wanted to see how you’re doing.” Honesty seemed to stun Sam. “I talked to your therapist.” Sam hummed sourly.

“Sam-”

“Let’s go home.”

“Sam-!” But he was already starting towards the door, moving surprisingly fast on crutches. Josh chased after him, but Sam didn’t want to be caught up to and he didn’t want to be recognized or understood. He just wanted quiet, and Josh was tired of quiet. But he helped Sam into the car anyway, threw his crutches in the trunk, and got into the driver’s seat. He put the keys in the ignition and didn’t turn them. His fingers curled around the steering wheel, but they weren’t going anywhere. Sam didn’t say anything, but he set his jaw and stared at the next building over. He knew what was coming. They had known each other long enough that anger was like bad weather—predictable and unavoidable. 

“Why won’t _you talk to me?”_ Josh hadn’t planned on yelling, but he was yelling anyway. “I am _right fucking here_ and you won’t say a word! I want to help you but-”

“You can’t help me!”

“Not if you don’t give me the chance!” Sam pressed his lips together until they formed a little white line.

“You had the chance. I gave you chances. You didn’t take them.”

“What the fuck does _that_ mean?”

“The motorcycle.”

“What about the motorcycle?”

“You think I wanted a motorcycle, Josh? You think I like that fucking death machine? I’ve got two alarm clocks and a fire extinguisher in the kitchen.”

“What are you even saying?”

“I’m saying you didn’t care, so I bought it. I thought it might make you remember that you don’t exist in your own little world. Ever since I got elected, you have pulled yourself out of my life and it’s like we’re not even married anymore. You don’t ever tell me what you’re thinking, good or bad. It’s like you think I’m fragile. Like you think any resistance is going to shatter our twenty-year relationship. A half a dozen near-death experiences, and it’s like you think telling me that something is a bad idea is going to break us. I didn’t buy the motorcycle to appeal to a younger demographic. I didn’t buy it because I was suffering a midlife crisis. I bought it because you didn’t care enough to tell me not to. I just wanted you to say ‘no’, Josh.”

_I wanted you to say no._

Josh was drowning.

_I just wanted you to say ‘no’, Josh._

He couldn’t have blamed himself more if he tried.

_I just wanted-_

“What the fuck, Sam?” He was speaking aloud all of a sudden. The dam was breaking, and a taste like battery acid coated his tongue and made his chest feel like it was going to dissolve into a caustic puddle of goo. “How was I supposed to know you wanted me to say no?”

“You weren’t!” Sam turned to him with angry tears in his eyes. On any other day, Josh might have pitied Sam for that, but he was finding that his supply of pity was gone and the kindness Sam had built for him, that Sam had given him as a gift all those years ago, was slipping beyond reach. “You weren’t supposed to know, you were just supposed to care enough to stop me anyway!” His brain hurt to think about all of the intricacies of this web Sam had spun to try to catch them both. That was what he was doing, wasn’t it? Trying to deceive them both back into caring. Except what he forgot was that the caring never stopped, it just went dormant, and so they fell through the cracks anyway. Josh was left hanging by a thread, and that thread was his anger. That was the only kind of caring he could manage anymore. 

“What the fuck… the fuck kind of manipulative, self-destructive lunatic buys a motorcycle out of spite?" But even that didn’t sound right. “No. Not… manipulative. Because you weren’t trying to trick me or play reverse-psychology or anything, were you? You knew telling me to speak my mind wouldn’t work, so you gave me an outlet. You gave me a dozen outlets. And I took none of them.”

“After the election, I knew something was wrong. Didn’t you? We were never the same. I’ve known you a long time. I know you’re not good at being honest about your feelings. I was trying to provoke you because you’ve got all these walls up with no doors to walk through. The best I can do is try to tear them down.”

“It still wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair of you to put yourself in danger because I didn’t give you the response you wanted. If anything would have happened to you because of it, I’d never have forgiven myself. You knew that. You did it anyway.” And maybe that would have been easier, because maybe then Josh would just be feeling guilty and he would be trying to make up for it and at least he’d think he had a place in Sam’s life anymore, even if it was just to try to compensate for hurting him. But he was feeling guilty now, and he didn’t know why. Neither of them was at fault for the accident, but that meant he had nothing to compensate for. He was just standing there watching Sam try to stand on his own and he wanted to come over and hold Sam up but Sam wouldn’t let him. “I know what you were trying to do with the motorcycle, but… do you know what it feels like to think that you don’t trust me to just care without provocation? You may have known me a long time, Sam, but I’m not incapable of change, and neither are you. I know that, because you used to be honest with me. At my father’s funeral, after we met your parents, at our wedding. You used to tell me when you needed help and you used to trust me to give it. I don’t know what changed, but something did. You don’t trust me anymore, do you?” Sam seemed to have no response. He was staring at Josh over the console, clenching his jaw in an effort to hide the tremble in his lower lip. That was, in and of itself, an answer. Josh nodded and turned the keys. The engine rumbled in front of him, the only live thing in dead air. 

Josh felt like everything inside of him had been wiped out, swept away by a flood. He was hollow, but instead of feeling lighter with all of that off his chest, his limbs felt heavy. If he let go of the steering wheel, he was sure he would just sink to the floor. Beside him, Sam sucked in a breath and released it with a hoarse cough. 

_I just wanted you to say no, Josh._

What a load of horseshit.

—

July 2013. Josh was losing track of dates. Not time, though. He couldn’t seem to lose track of time. The days eked by one-by-one and he moved sluggishly through them as if walking along the ocean floor.

But dates didn’t seem to matter anymore, because every day was the same. Every day, he rolled out of bed to find the other half already empty, and his other half already gone to work. They didn’t talk so much anymore, and this wasn’t the comfortable kind of silence that occurred when you’d been with someone so long you didn’t need to talk. This was the kind of quiet that came in the lulls between arguments, of which there were many. 

These silences were punctuated with the click of Sam’s new cane on the hardwood floors. It had a brass handle and a maple shaft and cost an arm and a leg, but it wasn’t like they couldn’t afford it, now well-into middle age. Sam’s knee wasn’t getting any better, but he had his good days and his bad days. On his good days, they were silent. On his bad days, they fought. Josh had his good and bad days, too. Sam’s accident brought back the sounds of sirens and the cold clarity that came with near-death experiences, and so Josh began waking up in the middle of the night with nightmares for the first time in almost a decade. And every time he did, every time he sat up heaving in a cold sweat with the electric light of Sam’s two alarm clocks, it was Sam who lulled him back to sleep. It didn’t matter how much they fought—the nightmares always seemed to supersede the fights, and Sam would curl up behind Josh, rubbing slow circles on his back until they both managed to drift off into restless sleep. Josh had no idea how Sam wasn’t having nightmares from his accident, but he wasn’t about to question a second miracle, or the only moments of goodness that he seemed to be able to grant them both.

Today, whatever day it was, was not a good day. It was Sam’s worst day of pain so far, evident in the way his face contorted when he stood up. It was also Josh’s worst day. He had dreamed of his own death again, and no amount of soothing from Sam had been able to bring him back to sleep. They spent the day quietly in separate rooms, although neither of them had work to do. Sam was in the office, reading. Josh didn’t want to bother him. He did, however, want the bottle of wine that had been sitting on the desk for weeks, ever since one of his students bought it for him as a thank-you for helping her graduate. 

Sam was in a chair in the corner with his leg propped up on an ottoman. He glanced up when Josh entered and watched him cross the room to retrieve the bottle. 

“Pour me a glass?” he asked just as Josh turned to leave, so quietly Josh thought he hadn’t said anything.

“I- sure.” He went to the kitchen to find a glass—two glasses now. The only sound in the apartment was the rain that kept pounding the windows and the click of Sam’s cane. 

“Here,” Josh said, and placed one glass of white wine in front of Sam where he sat at the dinner table. He himself did not sit, but leaned against the wall, staring out the window. He wished he was drunk already, because he did not know how to talk to Sam sober anymore. He did not know what to do with his hands or his legs or his mind or his mouth. All he knew was that in sleep, they were okay, and then they got out of bed and stopped being okay. “How did you sleep?” he asked, even though it was nearly time for them to go back to bed.

“Not great. You kept moving around, so I kept waking up.”

“Sorry-”

“No, don’t be sorry. I understand it. I’d rather be sleepless than unaware of your… well, whatever you want to call them. Nightmares. Night terrors. Flashbacks.”

“Thanks.” After years, their intimacy went far beyond love and sex. It went down to the core, to the pain that sat deeply within them, rooted into their brains. The pain linked them even when love and sex failed. 

“I’m sorry that they’re getting bad again.”

“It isn’t your fault.”

“I know that. I just don’t like to see you in pain.” Sam stared into his glass, and the reflection of the wine in his glasses made his expression imperceptible. “I keep wishing I could take it away. If I could just put it all on myself, if I could make you okay again… sometimes I wish it had just been me who got shot, because-”

“Oh my god.” Josh’s temper was quick to burn, never more so than now. He gulped down his glass of wine in one go. “Would you cut it out?”

“Josh-”

“I mean that. Cut it out with the martyr shit. I can’t sit here and listen to you wish for more pain, I seriously fucking can’t.” Sam’s Adam's apple bobbed in his throat as he swallowed hard and leaned forward over the table. “You’ve either got a martyr complex or a savior complex, or maybe you’ve got both, because you seem intent on getting hurt in an effort to save other people without any thought for how it affects you. Do you have any kind of self-preservation instinct, Sam? I mean, Christ, I know you’re a selfless motherfucker, but can you be a little bit selfish sometimes? Can you let someone else take the fall? Can you, for once in your life, not feel the need to be the universe’s punching bag?” Sam didn’t touch his glass. He just sat at the table in continued silence. Josh thought maybe that was a signal to stop, to shut up, but he couldn’t. He was on a roll now, and he was not going to be done until he truly was done. “You’re not invincible and I don’t know why you need to feel like you are. Is it just that you think I’ve got enough fear for the both of us? Because I absolutely do, but I cannot protect you from everything and I’d have thought you’d have fucking learned that!”

“I _did!”_ Sam roared from his seat at the table. “I learned that when my kneecap was shattered and I couldn’t walk for six weeks! I learned that when I thought nicotine withdrawal was going to kill me! I learned that a long time ago, Josh, when my parents couldn’t find it within themselves to give a shit about me and when I couldn’t seem to win at anything. I have known I wasn’t invincible since I was born twelve weeks early and spent a month in an incubator. I have always known, Josh, but forgive me for making an effort. Forgive me, please, for reaching something beyond what you believe I am capable of.”

“What I believe you’re capable of?” Josh put down his glass before he could shatter it in his shaking hands. “I believe you are capable of anything. I believe you could conquer the world, if you wanted to. I believe in your resilience and your bravery, but I also believe if you wanted to prove you could climb the tallest cliff in the world, you would kill yourself trying, and you would believe it was worth it. Do you know the story of Icarus, Sam? It’s one of the only myths I remember from middle school, but it reminds me of you, because Icarus wanted to fly. He wanted to reach the moon, to touch the stars. But he forgot that he was human and that his wings were made of wax, and so he fell to his death. I believe if you were given those wings, you would do the same. You are Icarus, Sam, and I have to sit here every day and watch you climb closer to the sun.”

“Maybe the reason I keep going higher and higher is because you’re such a control freak and I can’t take it anymore! You are so afraid of everything and you want everyone else to be as afraid as you are! When will you get that trying to hold me down doesn’t protect me, it just makes me resent you?” Sam screwed up his face, very obviously trying not to cry. “Maybe… maybe we got married too young. And maybe that’s why you’re so freaked out all the time. Maybe we just weren’t ready-”

“Too young? Sam, I was forty-five. I wasn’t too young. Maybe you were. I think sometimes you forget that other people are running out of time.”

“You talk like you’re dying.”

“I am. Slowly. Eventually. I’ll die before you will, and I don’t think you realize that.” Sam slammed his glass down, sloshing white-gold wine all over the tabletop.

“I do realize that, and I don’t know why you think I don’t-”

“You can’t die before I do, Sam, I won’t allow it, but you keep putting yourself in positions where you will! It’s like you have no idea of the danger you put yourselves in sometimes, even after it’s all over! I mean, for Christ’s sake, you were hit by a truck. You should be having flashbacks and nightmares and I don’t-”

“Who says I’m not?” Josh’s bones froze in his body. He couldn’t have moved even if he’d wanted to. 

“Who says I don’t have nightmares, Josh?”

“But you… you never…” His breath slipped away from him, replaced with icy air that tore his throat to shreds. “You always wake up when I’m having mine and-”

“Yes. I do. I help you get back to sleep. My nightmares, Josh… I’ve been having them for thirteen years. They’re not about me. They’re never about me. When I have nightmares, I see you. I close my eyes and I see you bleeding out on a sidewalk, or I see you sitting by my hospital bed, thinking you’re the one who did this to me. I do have nightmares, Josh, but not for myself.”

“And that’s the problem! Can’t you see that that’s the problem? You shouldn’t be more scared for me than you are for yourself! You have to start protecting yourself, you have to, because I can’t protect you forever. You won’t let me, and trying is so fucking exhausting.”

“I don’t want to be protected, Josh, and I never have. That’s never what I asked you for. I only ever wanted someone to be on my side.”

“And I am. I always have been. But your side is getting harder and harder to be on.”

“You’re supposed to be on my side no matter what-”

“And you’re supposed to be on mine! I never left you behind, Sam. When you gave Will Bailey your name and didn’t tell me, I stuck by you. I wanted kids, you said no, I stayed on your side. And it seemed like the easiest thing in the world when we were just puddle-jumping across the country and when I knew I would still have you. But watching you put yourself in danger isn’t the same, because I _don’t_ know that I’m always going to have you.”

“When we got married, we promised each other. In sickness and in health, in good times and bad, for richer or poorer. Did you mean that?”

“At the time? Yes. But at the time, I didn’t know that the bad times were going to be this bad, Sam. And I didn’t know you were going to be creating the bad times for yourself.” Josh could see that wasn’t the response Sam wanted, but he was done giving the answers he thought he was supposed to give. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He just knew what he thought he should do. Which was, for once, to tell the truth. “I always thought you were my miracle. I thought loving you was written in the stars. I thought you were some divine creation sent to make me better, but you aren’t. You’re just a man. You try to be something more but you will never be. You are not the sun and you are not the stars, Sam Seaborn, you are just a kid who never grew up and who never learned to fear what should be feared and-“

“And you are just a scared little boy who never learned to cope with the fact that losing people is inevitable!” Sam rose to his feet, bracing his hands against the table to keep his weight off his bad knee. His face didn’t look so young anymore. Anger aged him. “Pain is inevitable!”

“I know that! I know that pain is inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any more tolerable to watch you inflict it on me and on yourself without a second thought to the harm you cause. I have made you my sun and made you my stars and I have thought you were untouchable and I have let you lead me down the best and worst paths of my life. You have been my navigator for years, Sam, but there’s one issue with celestial navigation: you have to trust the stars you’re following. And I just don’t trust you to lead me where I’m supposed to go.”

“So?” Sam’s lower lip trembled even as he clenched his jaw, which made his words come out in a sort of hiss. “So what do we do now? What do you want from me? I can’t be any more than I am, honey, no matter what you want from me. You always want people to be more, to do more. You said it. I’m just a man. And I don’t know where you want me to go from here.” And just like that, Josh’s guiding light faded away to nothing. He didn’t have a path in mind. This path, whatever it had been, was no more. All he could remember was a conversation between strangers on a rainy day six miles from where they stood now, six miles that might as well have been two-thousand. That day, they had talked about what it was all for, and Josh had been so sure. He couldn’t be sure anymore. Of anything. 

“I don’t think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel anymore, Sam,” he said, choking when his voice cracked. “It’s like you said about our work a long time ago—it’s tiring and painful and it’s worth it for those moments when you feel you’ve done some good, but… I don't think we can do any more good. For each other. For ourselves. So I’m deciding, and I’m deciding for both of us. I’m done now.” When on earth had he decided that? Josh had no idea, but the fact of the matter was that he hadn’t said a single dishonest thing tonight. And while he could not hate Sam—hell, he could never stop loving Sam, not after all these years—he also could not spend another moment in this house, spinning out of control.

Sam, to his credit, looked surprised. His eyes widened, and he became young again. His eyes. Eyes that took in the world and carried it all, the good and bad and ugly. His eyes were the moon, craters of everything that Josh couldn’t quite touch. He was tired of trying to reach into them and falling short so often. His feet couldn’t even scrape the bottom of what Sam had built for them, what they had built together, some of it good, some of it painful. Too much of it was painful.

“You’re just… done? That’s it?” Sam sounded more tired than defensive.

“You’re not? I don’t have the energy to keep trying, Sam. Do you?”

“No. I don’t.” He was quite literally backed against a wall, but Josh had never felt more liberation in his life than hearing Sam say those words. It wasn’t because he wanted to be free of Sam. But he did want to be free of the fear, and now Sam had released him. “So, what now?” Sam asked, suddenly businesslike. It helped him to detach, to turn it into a transaction rather than a breakup. 

“I’ll draw up a petition—or you can, if you-”

“No. That’s fine. You do it.”

“We can decide who gets what later.” Josh nodded. So, this was what it was all reduced to. Twenty years of partnership and it all came to who got the house and who got the dog and who would serve the papers to whom. Looking around at the apartment, at all of the things that would become either his or Sam’s and would never be theirs again, it became too much. His coat hung on the rack by the door and he pulled it on with ease. Leaving was easy. How stupid did that sound?

“I’ll spend the night at Donna’s,” he said.

“Josh, you can-”

“No, Sam. I can’t. I’ll come by tomorrow to get some of my stuff. I-” He cut himself off. What was he going to say? _I love you?_ That was the one thing he couldn’t say anymore. So he chose not to say anything at all and allowed the door to swing shut behind him. From inside, he could hear a dull thump that sounded like a fist hitting a wall. He didn’t listen further. Whatever was going to happen would happen, and he no longer had to be around to see it.

Donna’s apartment building was on the other side of D.C., but it was early enough that Josh didn’t have trouble hailing a cab. He tried to think what he could possibly tell her and came up empty. He managed to text her and tell her he was on his way over, but nothing else came. 

Donna was ready to buzz him up when he arrived. Her door swung open to reveal her, looking half-asleep, blue eyes narrowed with concern.

“Josh, what the hell are you doing here? What happened?” She was the only person who Josh had even bothered to tell that he and Sam were fighting, but even she didn’t know the degree. She knew things hadn’t been the same since the accident. She had no idea that things had been different since long before that.

“Sam and I, we’re-” Josh’s words cut off, like his brain was short-circuiting. Words were simply lost to him. And so he did the only thing he could do. He started to cry, in great big gasping sobs that made Donna furrow her brow and pull him into a hug without asking what he was doing there again.

Falling asleep on her couch was easier than Josh had anticipated it would be. He wasn’t a very sound sleeper on his good days, and this was the furthest thing he had ever had from a good day. But the exhaustion of heartbreak won out and he was asleep by the time Donna tossed a blanket over his shoulders. He had no nightmares that night. He had something much worse. 

That night, he dreamed of a love story that spanned decades and an entire country. He dreamed of Sam, smiling and laughing and reaching up to pull a star out of the sky and giving it to Josh. He dreamed that he was 38 again, blowing out the candles on his birthday cake and wishing for more time. In his dreams, time came and went and whatever fear he had of losing time didn’t exist. There was just him and Sam and years and years of time.

Then he woke up in Donna’s living room, with years of time stretching out before him. His wish had come true. He had all the time in the world, and so did Sam, but their timelines diverged here and now. Josh had time and Sam had time but they did not have _their_ time, the time Josh saw in his dreams. That was the only kind of time Josh had ever wanted, he realized, and it was the only kind he would never have again. 

Donna came in from outside and handed him a Starbucks cup. She told him to get dressed and she would go see Sam and get him out of the apartment long enough for Josh to go pack some things. So that’s what he did. He got up, he got dressed, and he started the clock on the rest of his time.

—

August 2013. The key pressed a sharp, cold outline in Josh’s palm. It had been a long time since he’d held a new key. He would have to get used to it. There were a lot of things he would have to get used to, like the missing weight on the fourth finger of his left hand. 

After a month floating between hotels, he had finally found this place. It wasn’t as nice as the Arlington place, but he had relinquished the Arlington place to Sam without a fight. This one was closer to Georgetown anyway, and he didn’t need an apartment as big as the one they had shared. Besides, this was the first place Josh had ever owned. Yes, it was just a shitty condo, but it was _his_ shitty condo. His, not theirs. That was another big adjustment. Everything he had was now _his_ , never _theirs. Theirs_ had gone away the second he moved out. The actual divorce was still pending, but there was an air of finalization to the whole affair. It felt like riding the Metro all the way to the end of the line. Maybe you weren’t where you wanted to be, but you were there anyway. 

And this was where he was. New homes before always felt like hope and a freshly realized dream. This one just felt like a cheap replacement for all Josh had lost.

Donna and Charlie had helped him carry in the few boxes of stuff he had taken from the old place. Most of it, he let Sam keep. He didn’t want it, really. As a result, the condo was largely empty.

Donna and Charlie and Toby were all there to help Josh pick up his things, but while Donna and Charlie carried out boxes, Toby sat on the couch next to Sam, watching them all. He hadn’t taken Sam’s side, not exactly, there weren’t really sides to be taken, but there was an understanding that he and Sam had a connection that Josh never fully understood. He thought maybe he didn’t understand it because he had never had a brother.

The sound that the deadbolt made as it slid into the lock echoed around the nearly-empty living room. There was a couch and a stack of cardboard boxes that he would deal with come morning, but he just wanted to sleep. For the last month, he had slept dreamlessly and often. Dreamless sleep was vastly preferable to a nightmarish reality.

He hadn’t slept alone in years. There were occasional nights spent on the road when Sam was at home, of course, or vice-versa, but it had been so long since he had had a bed of his own. The sheets were scratchy and new and seemed to reject his presence, but he had nowhere else to be. The quilt that Donna had helped him pick out might have weighed a hundred pounds for the way it seemed to crush his chest. 

The loneliness seeped in through every window and crack in the floor. It pulled Josh’s arm away from his body, forcing his hand to brush the empty right side of the bed, forcing him to remember that six miles away, there was another bed but that one was empty on the left side. If he closed his eyes, those two beds became one and their worlds overlapped again, lining up just right. Behind his eyelids, Josh’s hand did not brush empty linen but was met with warm skin. 

_How could I be so mistaken?_ he wondered. _How could I not realize that I am still right here? I am here and Sam is here and we are still-_

A car sped past on the street below and the beginnings of a dream were shattered. Cold, untouched fabric chilled Josh’s fingertips and he pulled his hand back in, holding it to his chest, trying to remember. But this dream, like all others, was gone before his memory could grasp it.

Outside, the stars were bright in the sky, but Josh turned away from the window, pulling a pillow over his head. He didn’t want to see the stars anymore. Their glow hit his eyes like shrapnel. It was all too much—too much quiet, too much cold, too much pain. But he closed his eyes again, and there was that same world, off in a dream. He closed his eyes and the stars became a constellation in the shape of a man. The stars reached out and pulled him in. The stars became warm, tan skin, on which Josh recognized every freckle and mark. The stars held him in their arms and he was home again, and home meant something different, something it would never mean again.

—

October 2014. Josh was soaking wet and he really didn’t want to be in New York. Honest to god, he wasn’t entirely sure _why_ he was in New York. He had heard murmurs amongst old friends that there was a state senator here who was a shoo-in for the real senate if only she would get a better campaign manager. Josh usually didn’t trust murmurs or state senators, but he had tired of teaching. There was no payoff to teaching, other than the satisfaction of a job well-done. He missed victory, though, risking the pain of losing for a much bigger high than teaching could ever grant him. 

He had trouble remembering that high now as he dashed through puddles, trying to catch a cab that was already beginning to peel away from the curb.

“Fuck,” he grumbled, earning him a nasty look from an elderly woman passing by. “I guess I’ll walk.” So he did, he walked 14 blocks back to his hotel in the pouring rain. About 8 blocks in, he gave up on any effort to preserve his clothes and resigned himself to being drenched. God, he just wanted a beer, preferably in silence. But there was some convention in one of the hotel ballrooms and it had spilled out into the hotel bar, and now guys in suits crowded every inch of the lobby. Josh ducked and swerved through them. Just one beer, and then he’d go back upstairs. A sign outside the bar said something about a corporate law conference. Josh ignored it. He’d been shit at corporate law in law school, and that had been thirty years ago. If these guys would just leave him alone, he’d have his beer and go upstairs and get some sleep in before dinner.

The bartender gave him a strange look, but took his order anyway. He must have looked insane, dripping wet and asking for a Budweiser. None of the lawyers bothered him.

When was the last time he was in New York? It had been years. He had never liked New York, not even when… fuck. He’d gone almost the whole day without thinking about Sam, but this was always where his thoughts seemed to wind up.

New York without Sam was a different city. He had lost his navigator, and the city went back to seeming inconceivably big. He had no idea where Sam was anymore. He knew that he’d left D.C. when his term ended earlier this year. Beyond that, he could have been anywhere, and Josh wouldn’t know. If he needed to, he’d ask Donna, but he hadn’t asked so far.

There were certain things that would always belong to Sam, though, whether he realized it or not. New York City was one. The stars were another.

Josh’s thumb tore at the edge of the beer bottle label with a vengeance. It was an old habit and he couldn’t remember how or why it started. It gave him something to do with his hands, something that was methodical without being too precise. He piled the paper shreds on top of the coaster and tried not to look around, because everywhere he looked at these men in designer suits who all looked the same, he saw Sam. Designer suits, another thing Sam had staked his claim to. Josh wished he was more boring, more nothing, because if he had no interests or quirks or predilections, he would simply fade into gray. He wished he could stop seeing Sam everywhere he wasn’t, everywhere he-

“Can I get a glass of Chardonnay?” Faces were mistakable. Voices weren’t. Josh didn’t have to turn and look, but he did anyway, wiping soggy hair out of his face. He needed to be sure.

Sam looked tired. He leaned against the bar, his shoulders sagged, and his hair that was just slightly too long for a man of 45 hung in his face. Still, like always, there was something poised about him, like every relaxed gesture was heavily calculated to look that way. With a jagged silver streak across his temple, he looked like something biblical. Throw in his sudden presence just as he crossed Josh’s mind for the first time all day, and he looked vaguely… prophetic.

Was this what Josh had looked like, appearing out of the blue all those years ago?

Only Sam wasn’t here to sweep him off his feet and take him to New Hampshire. Sam wasn’t here for him at all. He hadn’t even looked two feet to his left to see Josh.

A glass of white wine was set on the bar in front of him. Sam picked it up with his left hand—he wasn’t left-handed, but his right hand still held the brass handle of his cane—and turned over his shoulder. He was going to walk away. And that was when he finally noticed Josh. 

There was something so fitting about this moment. Josh, soaking wet in an unfamiliar city, just waiting for Sam to look over and notice him; and Sam, tired and worn down, reading his face like he was some kind of novel written in a language that only Sam understood. This was time folding in on itself again, bringing them back to a moment they had lived before. The last time they lived this moment, they were 17 years younger, and reliving it now, Josh thought he could be that young again. He wanted, more than anything, to reach out and touch Sam’s face, or maybe run his fingers through that graying hair, but he was glued to this spot. There wasn’t anything he could do. He relinquished every right to reach out for Sam when he asked for a divorce, and there wasn’t anyone to be blamed but himself.

Looking at Sam, though, he didn’t see blame. Nor did he see anger or hurt or betrayal, the last thing he had seen on Sam’s face when they met to finalize the proceedings. He just saw surprise, the stunned kind of open-mouthed stare that people in horror movies made when they saw a ghost. 

Sam must have been there for the convention, then. Unless he had moved back to New York, but judging by the serious tan that covered his face and hands (and colored in the line on his finger where his ring used to sit) he hadn’t. He looked like he had gone back to California. Josh wanted to laugh, in a sick kind of way. All that time spent trying to escape California, only to go right back when things fell apart. People go back to what they know. That was suddenly very apparent. Sam went back to corporate law and California, Josh went back to campaigning, and it was like they had never met, except that Josh woke up every morning missing Sam so much it made him sick.

Did Sam miss him? If he did, he didn’t show it. But then, his poker face had always been much better than Josh’s. He looked tired, which didn’t make Josh feel any better. Exhaustion didn’t suit him. It just made him look older. 

What was this? This crossing of paths for the first time in the year since the divorce, in a place neither of them lived and neither of them expected the other to be. Josh spent the last few years raging against fate. Destiny was bullshit, of that he was so sure, and yet it was unimaginable that this could be anything but destiny. It was too impossible for coincidence.

But if he believed this was fate, that would mean he had to accept fate as a universal truth. That meant that everything—his meeting Sam, their coming back to each other over the years, the love, the heartbreak, and everything in between—could be fate. It would mean he had been wrong when he said things just happened. It would mean he had been wrong about a great many things.

Josh opened his mouth and couldn’t find the words for anything. He didn’t even know what he was trying to say. 

_I miss you._

_I’m sorry._

_I love you._

_Do you want to sit?_

_Fuck you._

_Fuck me._

_Hi._

None of it was right and he abandoned every attempt at speech just as the words started to rise in his throat. Maybe if he didn’t say anything, Sam would fill in the gaps. That was what he’d always been good at. He had the words and Josh had the voice and together, they almost put together one complete man. 

Those were the old days, though. They had learned how to exist on their own in the last year, without friendship or codependence or love to fall back on. So Josh sat on his barstool, searching for words he did not know, and Sam pressed his lips into a thin line, too many words than could be understood rushing through his head with nowhere to go.

He was gone. With a glass of wine in one hand and his cane in the other, he had not disappeared, but it might have been easier if he had. Instead, Josh watched his back as he went, leaning more heavily on his cane than he had in years past. He just kept walking and did not look back at Josh once.

And he hadn’t said a single word, because what do you say?

Josh left his beer half-finished on top of a five-dollar bill and went upstairs. He had no interest in seeking Sam out in a crowded hotel bar. Maybe if they could be alone, maybe if it was somewhere familiar, things would be different, but the way things were, Josh could very well have not seen Sam again for the rest of his life and felt better than he would if he’d chased after him downstairs. If it meant he would never have to see Sam walk away from him again, he would endure another three lifetimes of nauseating loneliness. If fate was what had brought them here, Josh wished it would just leave him alone. He had stopped giving a shit about what fate or destiny or God had in store for him a long time ago. He had had quite enough of his life being written in the stars, and he just wanted to stop thinking about the events of his existence as part of some greater plan. He didn’t want to have some great purpose to his life anymore. He just wanted to be at home, his real home in Arlington, curled up with Sam’s arms around his waist. And if he couldn’t get that, he wanted to be left alone.

When he was in his room, safely hidden behind the closed doors he preferred, Josh peeled off his wet clothes and left them in a trail on the floor leading to the bed. He fell asleep to thunder crashing on the road outside and woke up to a sunrise.

“Oh my god,” he muttered, and laughed deliriously. He couldn’t have thought of a more obvious metaphor if he tried. Still, it made him feel a little better to see the last traces of the stormy gray night disappear with the new day. Maybe he would blow off work today. After all, there were two years until the election. What was another day? 

And maybe he would go walk around the city a little. It was time he learned to see New York without seeing Sam’s face in every sidewalk and street light. It was time he learned to see the world beyond what it had been with Sam. Oh, God, how he wished he could be doing this with Sam at his side, but he learned a long time ago that wishing never did him any good. Nothing was ever going to happen if he just kept wishing. All that was left was to get up and to live and to try to forget the silver-haired ghost that haunted every inch of his life.

Forgetting was hard, but he’d done hard things before. This was just another on the long list of Herculean efforts Josh put himself through in order to keep living. 

_Just keep living._ That was the goal.

_Live. Without him._

_And then you won’t ever have to watch him walk away again._

—

That same quiet June evening. An evening thirty years in the making. Josh Lyman knows every second of those thirty years. He lived every second of those thirty years, the ones with Sam and the ones without him. He is still living them now. Rain splatters into his outstretched hand, water tracing its way through the thin lines on his palm that once made a Coney Island fortune teller laugh out loud and tell him he was in for a wild ride. She was right.

Sam regards him not coldly, exactly, but curiously. As if an alien has taken over Josh’s body and he cannot decide whether the alien’s intention is good or bad. He makes no effort to reach out for Josh’s hand. Instead, he rocks forward onto his tiptoes and looks up at the sky as best he can. They have stood like this maybe a thousand times before—Josh staring at Sam and Sam staring at the sky. 

He looks back at Josh now, still with that same analytical expression, only now the corners of his eyes are wrinkled in amusement that he is trying his hardest to hide. Josh can’t imagine why.

“What are you doing,” Sam says bluntly, less like a question and more like he’s saying _“You’re insane.”_

“I’ve spent too many days without you.” Josh finds the words come out with no effort. “And all of them have sucked. Well, that’s not true. I’ve had a few good days. But the years have sucked.”

“…I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do. You’re good at puzzles, Sam, you always were and I never was.” Sam sighs. He leans against one of the posts that holds up the gazebo’s roof, taking the weight off his bad leg. 

“Come back up here, Josh. Get out of the rain. You’re soaking wet.”

“No!” Josh cringes at his own raised voice. There are too many landmines that a misstep risks destroying everything, and after years he has forgotten where those mines are buried. “No. I don’t mind the rain. You… come on, Sam, you know-”

“I don’t! I don’t know why you always expect me to have all the answers, but I don’t. I don’t know what you want from me.” What was not evident years ago is evident now. They are two clocks who have never been in sync, no matter how hard they try. 

“Okay. I’m sorry. You’re right.”

“Come up here.” Josh shakes his head.

“No,” he repeats. “I need the rain. It helps me think.”

“Why do you need to think?”

“Because I’m not really sure what I’m asking you for.” Rain pounds the path around him. It washes away everything he cannot forget. He feels thirty pounds lighter and twenty years younger, standing here in the rain like he did so many times in his youth. He is clean of his own past, his regrets and triumphs and everything stupid he ever did, all of the things he pushed past to get where he is. Everything except Sam. Take away every inch of his past that he overcame to get here, and what’s left is Sam. Because, in so many ways, it is Sam who makes him who he is. Sam is unavoidably tangled in his history and being without him feels wrong, like a loose brick in his foundation that threatens to bring down the entire house.

Their history has seemed so complicated until now, but the rain seems to grant Josh a little clarity. He can see the web that lays out every meeting, every touch, every moment of their existence together. It’s all clear now—how they got here, why they’re here at all. It isn’t fate, nor is it coincidence. It is the simple fact that they will always come back to each other, and there will never be a moment apart where they wouldn’t rather be together. It’s funny, how even their worst years together seem miles better than the years they have spent apart. Perhaps those are just the white-wine-and-rose-colored glasses. Or perhaps it is the truth that Josh has been running too fast to see.

“I know I wasn’t… I wasn’t perfect. I’m not even sure I was any good.” He speaks the words as they pop into his head, not bothering to think beyond coherence. Eloquence is not, nor has it ever been his forte. He will leave that to Sam, as always. “But I know I’m not any good on my own. I’m getting older and I’m getting meaner and I miss the person I was. I miss the person that you made me. And, more than anything, I miss _you._ I’ve lost people before, but I’ve never had to lose someone and know that they were still out there walking around. I-” Josh stammers for a moment. He is losing his train of thought. “I know things got bad towards the end and I know that a lot of it was my fault, but that doesn’t make me miss you any less. I don’t know who I am without you, Sam, and maybe it’s fucked up that I rely on you so much to make me who I am but the truth is that I don’t like the person I am without you. I’ve had seven years to figure out how to be without you and I’m still utterly lost. God, I have no idea if you miss me at all, or if you’ve moved on and you’ve married someone else and moved on with your life like I probably should have done years ago, but it took seven years of aging for me to realize that… I’m not that afraid of getting old. It’s not that bad, when it comes down to it. I’m just afraid of getting old without you.” Sam stares at him with those wide, glassy, steel-blue eyes. There is so much anger still behind them, and so much fear too, but more as well. There are depths there that Josh has not seen in years and does not recognize.

A shiver tears through his shoulders and he grimaces. His wet clothes are freezing, but there is no point in trying to escape from the rain anymore. He cannot run. He has done far too much running.

And Sam is still just staring at him, like he has no idea what to say, or like he has nothing to say at all. 

“Sam-”

“I miss you every day.” He is so quiet over the sound of thunder that Josh has to read his lips to understand. “I miss you so bad I can feel it in my blood. I can feel it in my bones. You are in every part of me and I will never be able to live without missing you.” He folds his arms and turns his head back towards the sky as if he has just made a comment on the weather or the Dodgers season. 

“So then-”

“So then nothing. I remember the end of our marriage, Josh. I may miss you, but I remember what we went through. I’d take a little crippling loneliness over repeating that any day, no contest.”

“We don’t have to do that again.”

“We didn’t _have_ to do it the first time. But we did.”

“And the first time, we made mistakes.”

“Or _maybe-”_ The wind picks up and Sam has to shout now to be heard. “Maybe that’s just who we are! Maybe I'm a self-destructive neurotic and you’re an opportunistic narcissist and we just don’t fit together.”

“We can change, Sam!” Josh cries over the wind and rain and thunder. “We’ve done it before!”  
“No, I haven’t. I’m the same me I’ve always been.”

“No. You’re not.” He moves closer to Sam and Sam lets him. “Do you really not see how much you’ve changed? I have seen you be a thousand different people, Sam, and I have loved them all.”

“I’m not-”

“You are. You have. So have I. That’s all any of us can do is change.” Sam reaches out and Josh freezes. He tugs at the end of Josh’s bow tie, unraveling it and leaving it hanging loosely around his neck.

“You’re just you.”

“You really think you’re the same person you were when we met?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it mean something that we’ve changed and we still miss each other? Isn’t that important?”

“I don’t know.” Sam makes a sad attempt at a smile. Josh is reminded of nights in Sam’s office with his feet kicked up on the desk, watching Sam write something he doesn’t understand. It seems like decades ago and hours ago in equal measure.

Aside from the wind that ruffles his hair, he is completely still. He has stopped running. He really has changed, whether he realizes it or not. He may still be Sam, but that has come to mean something different, as it has before. 

“How many days has it been, Sam?”

“What?”

“Since I moved out. How many days?”

“Two-thousand five-hundred ten yesterday. Two-thousand five-hundred eleven today,” Sam answers simply.

“Do you remember that day we went to the planetarium and watched the presentation on supernovas?”

  
“Of course.”

“So, stars die sometimes. Right? And no one on earth knows for years because its light is still travelling through space and time. No one realizes it’s gone because in all appearances, it’s not. But after a while, you look up at the night sky, and it’s different. There are new stars in new places and some of the old ones are gone. That’s you, Sam. In those two-thousand five-hundred eleven days, you have changed. Outwardly, nothing’s different, and so you think you’re the same, but you are a supernova, Sam. You just never bothered to look up and realize it.” Sam peers over the top of his glasses. His eyes are starry with tears, and for a moment, Josh is thrown back in time to the last time he saw Sam with tears in his eyes. These are not the same kind of tears, though. Sam stares at him with a kind of blue-eyed wonder, like he has never seen Josh before. And maybe, to some degree, he hasn’t. They haven’t seen one another in two years, since Josh’s hair was still brown (it had little streaks of gray in it, until he woke up one morning to find it had gone shock-white) and Sam’s hair was still long (he has since cut it back into the ivy league haircut he had when they first met). 

“You know, that’s not true about the stars,” he says through a thin smile, choking on his words. “It’s an urban legend. Most of the stars we can see in our sky are close enough that when they die, we notice.”

“Oh my god.” Josh laughs. The sound is cut off by the splatter of rain, but it feels good to smile for real again, to smile at nothing more than Sam’s encyclopedic mind. 

“I get what you’re saying, though. That I can’t see how much we’ve changed because I just don’t bother to look that closely.”

“Look at me.” Josh moves even closer now. He has to lean his head back to keep eye contact. “Really look. Have I changed?” Sam considers him carefully. He holds out his hand but does not touch, as if Josh is some exhibit in an art museum. He drags his fingers through the air mere inches from Josh, feeling around for something intangible.

“Well… you’ve got white hair.” Josh snorts.

“I know.”

“It wasn’t white when I saw you a couple of years ago.”

“I just woke up one morning and it was like this.”

“And you grew a beard.”

“My god, you’re observant.”

“Sorry, I just-” Sam cannot help himself. He laughs. “It suits you. All of it.”

“Give me something else.”

“Okay. You haven’t brought up politics once all day. I’ve been watching you, and you haven’t even mentioned politics unless someone else brought it up. For the Josh I knew, that would have been impossible.”

“So? What’s the verdict, Your Honor?”

“I think… I think you should tell me how you think I’ve changed.” Josh surveys his ex-husband.

“Look at the way you’re standing.” Sam looks down at his own body, leaned haphazardly against a post. 

“What about it?”

“You look like a real person. You’re just letting yourself _be_ without thinking about it. It’s nice to see you un-invent yourself.” Sam gives him a satisfactory hum. 

“It’s hard to think that you still see me beyond how I see myself.”

“Yeah, well… that’s all love is, I think.”

“Do you-” He turns away, looking anywhere but Josh. “Do you? Still love me?”

“Sam.” Josh squashes a laugh threatening to rise in his throat. He reaches out and for the first time this evening he touches Sam, turning his face with gentle fingertips, slightly wrinkled from the rain, so that he is looking down at Josh. “I have never and will never have an answer to that question other than yes.” Sam leans into his hand, pressing his warm cheek against the cool dampness of Josh’s palm. “How ‘bout you?” Josh asks, as if he is asking if Sam still enjoys sailing or if he has read yesterday’s newspaper. He holds out his hand again, rebuilding the bridge.

“There is nothing more inconceivable to me than the idea that I could ever stop loving you.” There he is, the speechwriter. It is unimaginable to Josh that someone could ever say something like that off the cuff, but that is just how Sam’s mind works. His wonderful, beautiful mind that exists in a universe Josh will never understand. 

Sam stands closer to the edge of the gazebo than ever. The tips of his shoes poke out into open air, and it is pure balance that keeps him where he is, safely under shelter. Josh is ready to grab him, to pull him down, and—

“But…”

There will always be a ‘but.’

“But I hurt you. A lot.” While he speaks, Josh runs his thumb over the lines in Sam’s face, lines that seemingly shouldn’t exist on his still-boyish face. “I’m more cognizant of that now than I was then. I was careless and egocentric and trying so hard not to become my father that I became him anyway. I don’t pretend that that means nothing.” 

“And I don’t pretend you’re the only one who caused any hurt, Sam. But we never meant to hurt each other. We were a perfect storm, Sam—two people ideally suited for one another, running up against some of the worst things that can happen to a person. Some of those things were things we did, but some of those things just happened. Some of that pain isn’t going to go away just because we’ve changed. You’re always going to have a bad knee and I’m always going to be a little bit of an asshole-”

“A little bit?”

“Shut up. Point is, I’m not telling you all this ‘cause I don’t know that you hurt me, or ‘cause I don’t care. I forgive you whether you love me or not. I’m just completely fucking lost without you, Sam. And maybe if we do this again, I’ll keep being lost, but I’d rather be lost with you than without you. We’re not soulmates, I’m not stupid enough to believe that, but I don’t know who I’m supposed to be without you. You made me the man that I want to be, the man I think I was supposed to be.. I want that version of myself back, and I want you back and I am suddenly very aware that I sound like a selfish asshole right now, but in my defense, I’ve been standing out in the rain for fifteen minutes and I’m freezing.”

“I told you-”

“Yes, I know you told me.” Josh holds out his hand again. Sam looks down at the hand and back up to Josh. The rain refuses to let up even for a moment. In the darkness that surrounds them, it is almost possible to believe they are shrouded under a curtain, hidden away from the world. 

Cold eats its way into Josh all the way down to his bones, but he doesn’t shiver. In the years since leaving Sam, he has come to realize that cold is an inescapable compatriot of being alive. Josh closes his eyes and stops fighting the rain that seeps into his clothes and hair and skin

Then, there is something warm—Sam’s hand in his. Like a lost piece of the jigsaw puzzle finally falling into place. _Click._

In the freezing rain, Sam’s furnace-like warmth is not a fire. It is the ashes that remain of a burned-down life, still warm and glowing with sparks, but no longer posing a risk. The risk has already been taken and the consequences reaped. They have lived through a forest fire, an endless, sweeping blaze, and the rain has stamped it out. So, they are left with this, the ruined remains that fit entirely in the palm of Josh’s hand. Perhaps something can be made of the detritus, or perhaps it is nothing more than dust. 

“I don’t know if forgiveness exists for us.” Sam’s voice is raw, like it isn’t him speaking but something else from deep inside. “But I do know that every time I leave you behind, I end up somewhere I don’t want to be.” He sucks in a shuddering breath and reaches for his cane. With one hand in Josh’s, steadying him, and the other wrapped around the brass handle of the cane, he steps down into the rain. “You’re right. It’s cold,” he chuckles as the rain soaks his hair. Silver hair fades to black, and Josh is once again standing in front of the jogger who knocked him down almost thirty years ago. 

Sam shivers and Josh stops thinking. He just wraps his arms around Sam, one over his shoulder and one under his arm, and he buries his face in the crook of Sam’s neck. He inhales deeply the familiar scent of Old Spice, coffee, and smoke.

They are beyond the point of holding one another up. Josh can stand just fine on his own and so can Sam (metaphorically, anyway). It doesn’t matter that all they have are their own burned-out ramshackle skeletons, they are standing, and still on their feet. A little singed, perhaps, and a little scorched, but still standing. They stand together now not because they need to, but because it is finally possible to not need one another.

Josh releases Sam, who ducks his head, suddenly bashful.

“We’ve been gone for a while,” he says, pointing back up at the party on the hill. Josh has almost forgotten the reason they’re here. He has almost forgotten that there is anyone here but them. “We should go back before anyone starts to suspect we’re getting up to something untoward.”

“Untoward?”

“Improper. Unsuitable.”

“I know what untoward means. I’m asking what we could possibly be up to that they would consider unto-” Josh freezes. _Oh. That._ “Oh. That.” He feels his face turn red.

“Yes, Josh. That.” Sam tilts his head, smiling that smile that he reserves just for Josh’s foolishness. Josh clears his throat and swallows a laugh.

“You’re probably right.” He doesn’t know what to do, so he turns on his heel and starts up the path. His hands are shoved deep in his pockets and his eyes are fixed on the only point of light in the darkness, hardly visible through the rain. Even through the thunder, music still plays. Life goes on in a storm.

About three yards up the path, Josh stops in his tracks. He hears the delayed reaction of Sam’s cane hitting the pavement behind him.

“Sam?” He doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t need to. He can see Sam in his mind without even looking, not the now-Sam who follows him through the rain but the younger Sam he already knows too well. He’s still got to get to know the new Sam, the Sam he has become.

“Yeah?”

“Where are we going?” His feet may be pointed in the direction of the wedding reception, but his compass stands behind him.

“…I don’t know.”

“Are you following me?” 

“Yeah. Always.”

“You’re just going to follow my lead? After all these years?” 

“Yeah.” Josh jolts at the closeness of Sam’s voice. Sam’s hand slips back into his. Warmth shoots into his hand and back up his arm, tracing the lines of his veins and arteries, back to his heart. “I’d have followed you anywhere. I see no reason to stop now.”

Josh starts forward again, this time with Sam holding onto his hand, walking a step behind. No looking back. Not anymore. It doesn’t do him any good. He takes his time and so does Sam. They don’t have anyplace to be and they don’t have to fill their time with useless movement. It is enough to simply _be._ This is what they have in common now, they no longer mind the stillness. Stillness brings comfort and stability and allows them to look around and see the night for what it is, which is beautiful. The rain goes from a downpour to a shower and a shower to a sprinkle and a sprinkle to nothing at all. The clouds are blown away in a gust of wind, leaving just the stars scattered across the velvet black, and the moon. The moon, which casts just enough light to turn all of the puddles into mercury.

The sound of their steps is drowned out by the music from over the hill that grows steadily louder. Their shoes remain firmly on the pavement, and Sam’s hand keeps Josh grounded. 

Their friends are still dancing under the tent. They seem to be unaware of the storm that has just passed. They are perfectly happy to be getting older.

No one looks over to see Sam and Josh coming up the hill. That’s just fine, they live in a world Josh doesn’t understand and never will. He is perfectly happy to observe from the outside so long as he is not alone, and he isn’t alone. Not anymore. They stand at the edge of the floor, on the precipice of something they do not understand and never will and do not need to as long as they remain ignorant together. 

Behind Josh is their past, quickly beginning to fade in the rearview. It is what has brought him here, and it is what will inform him for the rest of his life, but it is not everything. It is not the end.

Before Josh lies a future, one that he has molded and shaped with his very own hands. That future contains friends, it contains life, and most importantly, it contains Sam. It is not the future he expected the day they got married, nor is it the future he expected the day they got divorced, but any future with Sam is better than one without. This is their chance to move past the pain and joy and hurt and comfort of the last thirty years. There’s no going back, even if they wanted to. 

“Shall we?” Sam asks. He takes the first step onto the floor with his bad leg, leaning heavily on his cane. Their hands hang at his side. Josh steps up beside him. 

“Why the hell not?” He allows Sam to pull him further from the sidelines than he’d like, too close to their friends and the action. 

Sam props his cane against a table, using Josh’s arm for support. He looks entirely natural and at ease. Not calculated in the slightest. He tugs on Josh’s hand and nods towards the dance floor.

“Come on.” Josh rolls his eyes, but he shuffles along with Sam at his side. They find an empty corner, as far away from the happy couple and their happy friends as possible. Sam finds a place for his hands, which are fidgety as ever—one on Josh’s back, the other on his shoulder, which acts as a sort of crutch to take weight off of his leg. They have not danced together in many years, and Josh has never been a good dancer, but it comes as easily to him now as if he had been a dancer all his life. It might help that Sam has always been a good dancer, even with his knee the way it is.

Over Sam’s shoulder, Josh sees their friends. He pretends not to notice that C.J. taps Toby’s shoulder, pointing frantically. He pretends not to notice that they get the attention of Charlie and Zoey, who look more excited about the development than they do about their own marriage. The only one whose eye he bothers to catch is Donna, who places a hand over her heart and gives him a teary-eyed smile. He smiles in return. Some things never go away. 

Overhead, the sound of steady rain on the tent carries above the music, but they are all safe and protected. This is where they are all supposed to be, Josh realizes at once. Not because of fate or destiny or anything else. Simply because they are a group of friends who are more like family, and because New Hampshire will always be the place they come back to, whether they think they will or not. 

Between the tent and the storm clouds, Josh cannot see the stars. It does not matter. Stars die, constellations change, the world keeps turning, and none of it matters all that much. He has as much of the cosmos as he could ever need right here, and what isn’t right here is out there, and it’s never coming back.

Although, who knows? Maybe the ghosts who haunt Josh’s past will come back, maybe they won’t, but he has learned to live with them. Maybe he’ll be happy again, maybe the happiness will never come back, but he doesn’t know. He won’t know. That’s the thing about being human. Nine years, and every cell in the human body is replaced. That person is fundamentally not the same person they were. It takes nine years to regenerate the human body, but only one quiet June evening in the New Hampshire countryside to create a new Josh.

**Author's Note:**

> hey there, welcome to the end! this fic was the product of almost 40 days of work, and I have to say I am incredibly proud of it, so if you enjoyed it, please leave kudos and a comment! I promise it makes my day as a writer to see that. 
> 
> thank you so much for reading <3


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